“It required an immense amount of stamina,” Emma Thompson says. “After each one, you said, ‘Never again.’” The actress is talking about her experience of being in Merchant Ivory films. She made her name in Howards End, winning the Oscar for best actress for her performance as the arch Margaret Schlegel, and went on to star in The Remains of the Day opposite Anthony Hopkins and a young Hugh Grant.
The films are typical of those made by Ismail Merchant and James Ivory; they look like elegant period dramas, but beneath the surface repressed emotions simmer, with an often brutal humanity. Look at well-behaved Lucy Honeychurch and the rebel George Emerson’s awkward and passionate relationship in A Room with a View. “Period movies had been clunky and all about the frocks until then, but this was different,” Thompson says, in a new documentary, Merchant Ivory.
