What does it take to be an A-List screenwriter?  What road did some of today’s most successful scribes walk before they hit it big?  In ‘The Screen Life’ we examine the path to success for some of Hollywood ’s biggest.   

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. This German-born writer and her family moved to England in 1939. After her 1951 marriage to architect Cyrus S.H. Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala moved to India and began publishing a series of acclaimed novels, many of which dealt with the culture clash between Indians and the British. She turned screenwriter when the director-producer duo of James Ivory and Ismail Merchant sought her permission to film her novel, "The Householder" (1963). Continuing with the pair, Jhabvala penned other insights into post-Colonialism with "Shakespeare Wallah" (1965), "The Guru" (1969), "Autobiography of a Princess" (1975), and "Heat and Dust" (1983, based on her award-winning 1975 novel).

By the mid-1980s, however, partly in response to the poor box-office performance of several Merchant-Ivory original productions, Jhabvala moved with the duo to a series of intelligent, respectful adaptations of period novels, especially those of E M Forster and Henry James. "The Europeans" (1979) had been an early attempt in this direction, but the trio's first really successful venture into the drawing room was "The Bostonians" (1984). A more lighthearted follow-up, "A Room with a View" (1986), proved popular with critics and public alike, and brought Jhabvala an Oscar for her nicely judged adaptation of Forster's comedy of manners. After adapting two Evan Connell novels into a touching, time-spanning cinema portrait of "Mr. and Mrs. Bridge" (1990), she won a second Oscar for another Forster adaptation, "Howards End" (1992). Jhabvala's talent for creating strong-minded if sometimes eccentric women also found expression in her one non-Merchant-Ivory endeavor, John Schlesinger's quirky "Madame Sousatzka" (1988). She has continued to write period dramas for Merchant-Ivory, including "The Remains of the Day" (1993), "Jefferson in Paris" (1995), and "The Golden Bowl" (2000).

Next for Jhabvala and her collaborators was a sophisticated, unpretentious adaptation of Diane Johnson's bestselling novel "Le Divorce" (2003), a relaxed, sophisticated and contemporary tale of two American sisters in Paris: one a pregnant expatriated poetess (Naomi Watts) suddenly abandoned by her philandering French husband; the other a fresh, naive young woman (Kate Hudson) caught up in a seemingly cosmopolitan affair with a roguish, married and much older French diplomat.