Academy Award winner, novelist Jhabvala

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, the German-born screenwriter and novelist who, as the writing member of the Merchant Ivory filmmaking team, won two Academy Awards for adaptations of genteel, class-conscious E.M. Forster novels, died Wednesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 85.

James Ivory, the director with whom she collaborated, said the cause was complications of a pulmonary condition.

Jhabvala was already well-established as an author when she began her screenwriting career with Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant. Her 1975 novel, Heat and Dust, about an English woman exploring a family scandal in India, received the Man Booker Prize, Britain’s highest literary honor. She wrote the screenplay for the Merchant Ivory version in 1983 as well.

Over four decades, beginning in 1963, Jhabvala made 22 films with Merchant and Ivory, all examining culture in one way or another, often one that has vanished. Their successful A Room With a View (1986), based on Forster’s novel about a sheltered young English woman who has a life-changing experience on vacation in Italy, earned Jhabvala the Oscar for best adapted screenplay.

History repeated itself when she won the same award for Merchant Ivory’s

Howards End (1992), from a Forster book in which shifting Edwardian social classes cross paths with sometimes cruel results.

The filmmaking team’s collaborations also included The

Remains of the Day (1993), based on Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel. Merchant died in 2005.