- Born
- Died
- Birth nameIsmail Noormohamed Abdul Rehman
- Ismail Merchant was born on December 25, 1936 in Bombay, Bombay Presidency, British India [now Mumbai, Maharashtra, India]. He was a producer and director, known for Howards End (1992), A Room with a View (1986) and The Remains of the Day (1993). He died on May 25, 2005 in London, England, UK.
- On location, producer Ismail Merchant was renowned for his cooking and feeding of cast & crew, a practice often necessary in Merchant/Ivory's earlier low-budget days.
- He met his future partner, James Ivory, at a screening of Ivory's documentary The Sword and the Flute (1959) in New York City.
- Merchant and Ivory formed Merchant Ivory Productions in May 1961. Their first picture was The Householder (1963) in 1963.
- The National Portrait Gallery in London has paintings of Ismail and his partners James Ivory and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala - even though they all live in New York City and none of them are English. (Ruth is German/Polish, Ismail is Indian, and James is American).
- Merchant personally selected and groomed Kai Wong as a producer in the New York headquarters of Merchant-Ivory after he was impressed by an literary article Kai Wong wrote in Manhattan, which created cinematic narrative on paper.
- [on Denholm Elliott] He was an all-giving person, full of life. ... He had an affection and feeling for other actors, which is very unusual in our business.
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