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Producer Merchant buried in native Bombay
Ismail Merchant, the Indian-born Hollywood producer who mastered the period-piece genre in a 44-year filmmaking partnership with James Ivory, was buried Saturday in the town of his birth.
Relatives and friends gathered at his ancestral home in downtown Bombay. Several actors from the Indian film industry who had worked with Merchant also attended the funeral. "It was ... his wish to be buried in India, and he wanted to be buried near his mum," said Jaya Ramachandran, a production coordinator who worked with Merchant for 10 years. Merchant, 68, died Wednesday at a London hospital. He had recently undergone surgery for abdominal ulcers, according to Indian television reports. He was unmarried and had no children. The Merchant-Ivory brand of costume drama spans some 40 films from "The Householder," a 1963 film set in India, to "Le Divorce" in 2003, an art house hit. Their films won six Academy Awards, including the best-actress Oscar for Emma Thompson for the 1992 film "Howards End." They usually teamed up with screen writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala for movies filled with lush panoramas of the English and Indian countryside and told riveting stories of class, manners, desire and love. He met Ivory in a New York City coffee shop in 1961. Their first film, "The Householder," was based on a novel by Prawer Jhabvala, and its 1963 premiere was held at the residence of then-U.S. Ambassador to India John Kenneth Galbraith.
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