General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Maurice (1987 film)

Maurice is a 1987 British period romantic drama directed by James Ivory and produced by Ismail Merchant for Merchant Ivory Productions, adapted from E. M. Forster's novel of the same name. It follows Maurice Hall, a young Cambridge graduate who, trapped by the oppressiveness of puritanical Edwardian society, tries to come to terms with his sexuality.¹ The film stars James Wilby as Maurice, Hugh Grant as Clive Durham, and Rupert Graves as Alec Scudder, with supporting roles for Denholm Elliott, Simon Callow, Billie Whitelaw, Ben Kingsley, Judy Parfitt, Phoebe Nicholls, and Helena Bonham Carter.²

Key fact	Detail
Director / producer	James Ivory; produced by Ismail Merchant, Merchant Ivory Productions, with Film Four International (UK) and Cinecom Pictures (US)¹
Screenplay	James Ivory and Kit Hesketh-Harvey, from E. M. Forster's 1913–14 novel, published posthumously in 1971¹^•³
Running time	140 minutes¹
US release	18 September 1987⁴
Venice 1987 awards	Silver Lion for Best Director (shared with Ermanno Olmi), Best Actor for James Wilby and Hugh Grant, and the Golden Osella⁵
Commercial record	Lost money at the box office; nominated for one Oscar, for costume design⁶
Restoration	4K restoration by the Cohen Media Group from the original camera negative; world premiere at Berlinale 2017 (Berlinale Classics)¹

Spoilers

Plot

In 1909, Maurice Hall (James Wilby) enters Cambridge, where he befriends the wealthy Clive Durham (Hugh Grant). Clive confesses that he is sexually attracted to Maurice, who realizes he is a homosexual when he begins to return Clive's feelings. The two embark on an intense but chaste affair to avoid tarnishing Clive's reputation; the relationship eventually ends, and Clive marries Anne (Phoebe Nicholls). While visiting Clive, Maurice is drawn toward his friend's servant, the gamekeeper Alec Scudder (Rupert Graves).⁸

The film is set before World War I, when homosexuality was outlawed in Britain; Clive, a repressed aristocrat who fears exposure and disgrace, follows convention and marries, while Maurice falls into a passionate sexual affair with Scudder.⁵ In Forster's book, Clive experiences a genuine change and begins to desire women rather than men; the film makes Clive's change more willed, but the effect on Maurice is the same.⁹ The final minutes culminate with a shot of Clive, rather than Maurice, a choice the BFI describes as elevating the film to true greatness and a rarity in queer cinema from the 1980s.⁶

Source novel and adaptation

E. M. Forster wrote Maurice in 1913–14, a pioneering work of queer fiction, but it was not published until 1971, a year after his death.³^•⁶ On his death in 1970, Forster bequeathed the rights to his works to King's College, Cambridge, where he had been a Fellow from 1947, so adapters had to secure rights from the college. As a token of thanks for the rights to three Forster novels, A Room with a View, Maurice, and Howards End, the Merchant Ivory team donated their work-in-progress screenplays to the King's E. M. Forster Papers.⁷

Unusually for a Merchant Ivory production, the screenplay was not written by their long-term collaborator Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, though she gave significant uncredited collaborative assistance. Writers James Ivory and Kit Hesketh-Harvey restructured the narrative order of the story in several different ways across a treatment and three manuscript drafts before the film was edited to follow, almost, the chronology of the novel.⁷

Production and release

The film was a Merchant Ivory Productions (UK/US) production made in association with Film Four International and Cinecom Pictures. The crew included cinematographer Pierre Lhomme, editor Katherine Wenning, production designer Brian Ackland-Snow, and composer Richard Robbins.¹ The film debuted globally at the 1987 Venice Film Festival, where a Silver Lion for Best Director went to Ivory, a prize he split with Ermanno Olmi.¹⁰ It was released in the United States on 18 September 1987.⁴

Unlike A Room with a View, Maurice featured no big star names: James Wilby was a relative newcomer, and Hugh Grant was seven years away from Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994).⁶ The British Board of Film Classification passed the film at 15 for brief nudity, moderate sex, and sex references; a 1988 physical-media version received cuts as part of the classification process.²

Reception and legacy

A Room with a View had been a commercial and critical hit, winning three Oscars and five BAFTAs. Maurice, by contrast, lost money at the box office and was nominated for just one Oscar, for costume design. The BFI notes that the explanation that it was simply too gay for 1980s audiences is tempting but far from the whole story: Stephen Frears' My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) had been an unlikely hit, and the 1981 television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, with its ambiguous relationship between Charles and Sebastian, had been a huge ratings success. What set Maurice apart was that, unlike those dramas, it was passionate and celebratory, released at a time of AIDS panic and press shaming of gay men.⁶

Claire Tomalin, reviewing the film in Sight & Sound in 1987, found it faithful to the joy and pain of its source novel.¹¹ On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes the film holds an 81% Tomatometer from 36 reviews and an 87% audience score, with a critics consensus that it sensitively explores the ramifications of forbidden desire with a powerful love story.⁸ On Metacritic it scores 75 out of 100 based on 14 critic reviews.¹²

The BFI Player describes the film as Merchant Ivory's landmark adaptation of Forster's classic LGBTQ+ novel and a precursor to the James Ivory-scripted Call Me by Your Name (2017).¹¹ The BFI Shop has called it a landmark film as important as any in the history of gay cinema, presenting a positive and enriching portrait of first love.¹³

Restoration

The Cohen Media Group's restoration used a 4K scan of the original camera negative. James Ivory approved the digitally restored version, and cinematographer Pierre Lhomme supervised the color correction. The restoration premiered at the 2017 Berlinale in the Berlinale Classics strand, and the film was re-released in theaters on 19 May 2017 and on streaming on 5 September 2017.¹^•⁸ A UK-wide re-release followed on 27 July 2018, distributed by BFI Films.²

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026