John Brabourne, 80; British Baron Who Produced Movie ‘A Passage to India’

Britain’s Lord John Brabourne, the producer of such epic films as “A Passage to India” and also a survivor of an Irish Republican Army bomb attack in 1979, has died. He was 80.

Brabourne died Thursday at his home in Kent in southeastern England, of unspecified causes, a family spokesperson said.

Although Brabourne preferred to be known for his work in movie and television production, he was a prominent member of the British peerage. He had been the 7th baron Brabourne since 1943.

The 1979 bombing incident on a fishing boat killed his father-in-law, World War II hero Louis Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India before it gained independence from Britain. Also killed were Brabourne’s mother, Doreen, the Dowager Lady Brabourne; his 14-year-old son Nicholas; and a local crewman, Paul Maxwell.

Brabourne; his wife, the Countess Patricia Mountbatten of Burma; and Nicholas’ twin brother Timothy -- the only other passengers -- were badly injured.

A former chairman of Thames Television, Brabourne earned praise for producing movies with all-star casts based on Agatha Christie’s murder mysteries. Among them were “Murder on the Orient Express” in 1974 with Albert Finney, Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman and Sean Connery; “Death on the Nile” in 1978 with Peter Ustinov, Bette Davis and David Niven; “The Mirror Crack’d” in 1980 with Elizabeth Taylor; and “Evil Under the Sun” in 1982 with Roddy McDowall and James Mason.

He was also known for filming classics, including Shakespeare’s “Othello” with Laurence Olivier in 1965 and “Romeo and Juliet” in 1968; the latter earned Brabourne a Golden Globe award for best English-language foreign film.

But he earned particular attention in Hollywood for his tenacity in making the grand-scale “A Passage to India,” directed by David Lean. The effort took Brabourne and his producing partner, Richard Goodwin, nearly a quarter of a century, prodding Brabourne in 1985 to call it “the most difficult thing of my life.”

The movie, which was released in 1984, earned 11 Academy Award nominations and won Oscars for best supporting actress for Peggy Ashcroft and best score for composer Maurice Jarre.

“It is noteworthy how often the current films that seem individual and admirable turn out to have had a strong producer or producers ... ,” former Times Arts Editor Charles Champlin wrote in 1985. “David Lean’s ‘A Passage to India’ would have remained a futile dream without Richard Goodwin and John Brabourne.”

Brabourne, who like Goodwin was born in India, first read E.M. Forster’s novel about class struggle in 1928 British-ruled India when he was there in 1957. He was making the first film he produced, “Harry Black and the Tiger,” about Stewart Granger pursuing a Bengal tiger.

Convinced that Forster’s novel should be made into a movie, he met with the author a decade later and, with difficulty, persuaded him to sell the rights. But he failed to get a written contract. Forster died in 1969, leaving the rights to Kings College, Cambridge, whose administrators distrusted filmmaking even more than the author.

When the rights finally were secured, Brabourne faced another long battle to get the then-pricey $17.5 million in financing. Columbia Pictures, which distributed the film in the United States, ultimately paid about half the cost.

The novel centered on proper young Englishwoman Miss Quested (Judy Davis), who was fascinated by but fearful of the exotic life she saw in India, and Indian Dr. Aziz (Victor Banerjee), who was tried for allegedly raping her in the mystical caves of Marabar.

The long delay in turning the book into a movie sprang primarily from controversy over how graphic the caves scene would be on-screen. Forster’s novel left what happened in the caves up to the reader’s imagination, and Cambridge demanded the same discretion. Some studios and other financiers wanted otherwise.

Brabourne and Lean agreed that, in Lean’s words, “the rape happened in Miss Quested’s mind,” and shot the saga devoid of explicit sexual contact.

The future producer was born John Ulick Knatchbull on Nov. 9, 1924, in Bombay, where his father was governor and later viceroy of India. The boy spoke Hindi as fluently as English. At age 10 he was sent to England to be educated at Eton and later Oxford -- conceding that he often skipped lectures to attend as many as three films a day.

The family title passed to his older brother, Norton, when their father died in 1940, and to Brabourne after Germans killed his brother in Italy in 1943.

A captain of the Coldstream Guards during World War II, Brabourne met the Mountbattens when he was assigned as an aide to then-Adm. Mountbatten, supreme Allied commander of Southeast Asia.

He married Patricia in 1946 in a lavish royal ceremony attended by King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. The bride’s attendants included Princess Elizabeth (now Queen Elizabeth II) and her late sister, Princess Margaret.

After his father-in-law eased his entry into the motion picture industry by introducing him to director-producer-writer Alexander Korda, Brabourne worked his way up the production ladder. Mountbatten, chief of defense after the war, also gave his filmmaker son-in-law access to the Royal Navy for his movies.

Among Brabourne’s television productions were 1966’s “The Life and Times of Lord Mountbatten” and “The National Gallery -- A Private View” in 1974.

In 1988, he shared a Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. award for best film for his last major motion picture, “Little Dorrit,” adapted from the Charles Dickens novel.

The producer was instrumental in forming the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, or BAFTA, which awards the British equivalent of the Oscar.

He is survived by his wife, six children and several grandchildren.