50 Fun Facts About A Room with a View

In A Room with a View, which river were Lucy and Charlotte promised they would see from their Florence rooms?

The Arno was the view they had been promised, but their rooms faced a courtyard instead. Mr Emerson's blunt offer to swap rooms sets the whole story going.

Which actress, aged eighteen, had her film breakthrough as Lucy Honeychurch in the 1985 film A Room with a View?

Helena Bonham Carter had just finished Lady Jane when she was cast, and matched Forster's picture of Lucy as a pale young lady with a mass of dark hair.

In A Room with a View, what does Lucy witness in the Piazza della Signoria that makes her faint into George's arms?

A fatal stabbing takes place right in front of Lucy as two men quarrel over a debt, and George carries her clear. Shaken, the pair end up talking alone for the first time.

Which actress, later Downton Abbey's Dowager Countess, played Charlotte Bartlett in the 1985 film A Room with a View?

Maggie Smith won a BAFTA and a Golden Globe as Lucy's fretful cousin, and was Oscar-nominated too. Twenty-five years later she was trading barbs at Downton.

Which star of My Left Foot and Lincoln played the snobbish Cecil Vyse in the 1985 film A Room with a View?

Daniel Day-Lewis was offered either George or Cecil and chose the prig as the harder part, in the same year he broke through in My Beautiful Laundrette.

In which US sitcom does the Finer Things Club discuss A Room with a View over an English tea party?

The Office gave the book to Pam, Oscar and Toby's exclusive club in the 2007 episode Branch Wars, while Andy's desperate efforts to join got nowhere.

In A Room with a View, Freddy Honeychurch invites George Emerson to the family home to play which game?

Tennis brings George back to Lucy's garden, and Cecil's sneering refusal to make up a game that evening is the last straw. She ends their engagement the same night.

Which actress, later M in the James Bond films, played novelist Eleanor Lavish in the 1985 film A Room with a View?

Judi Dench won a BAFTA for the part, though she and the director fell out on set when he suggested she play the novelist as a Scot.

Which Crazy Rich Asians author reset A Room with a View among jet-set millionaires in the 2020 novel Sex and Vanity?

Kevin Kwan moved the story to Capri and the Hamptons, where Lucie Churchill is engaged to the new-money Cecil Pike but drawn to a surfer called George.

Charlotte Bartlett, Lucy's older cousin, travels with her to Italy in A Room with a View in what official role?

Chaperone is the job Charlotte takes with martyred seriousness, yet George still kisses Lucy on her watch. Charlotte frets mostly about her own failure.

Which famous brand of guidebook does Miss Lavish take from Lucy, leaving her lost in Florence in A Room with a View?

Baedeker guides were so standard that travel handbooks in general took the German firm's name. Miss Lavish confiscates Lucy's, gets them both lost, then wanders off still holding it.

In A Room with a View, which instrument does Lucy Honeychurch play with a passion she never shows in conversation?

The piano is where Lucy stops being polite. The vicar who hears her predicts that life will become very exciting if she ever starts to live the way she plays.

Which Oliver Stone film beat A Room with a View to Best Picture after the two tied for the most Oscar nominations?

Platoon and Forster's Edwardian romance had eight nominations each. The Vietnam drama won four, including Best Picture, and the romance went home with three.

Which American director, Ismail Merchant's partner in a famous filmmaking duo, made the 1985 film A Room with a View?

James Ivory was keener on the book than his partners were, and it earned him a Best Director nomination. He finally won an Oscar at 89, for writing Call Me by Your Name.

In A Room with a View, which blood-spattered belongings of Lucy's does George Emerson throw into the river?

Her photographs, souvenir pictures of famous paintings, had fallen beside the dying man. George's flustered confession that he threw them away strikes Lucy as boyish.

After breaking her engagement in A Room with a View, Lucy plans to escape to which country with the Miss Alans?

Greece is where the two elderly sisters are bound, and Lucy begs to tag along rather than face her feelings. A talk with old Mr Emerson stops her before she sails.

In A Room with a View, Charlotte hurries Lucy away from Florence to which city the day after George's kiss?

Rome is where they join the Vyse family, and where Lucy gets to know Cecil better. She turns down two proposals from him abroad before accepting a third at home.

E. M. Forster, author of A Room with a View, belonged to which London circle that included Virginia Woolf?

Bloomsbury Group friends turned their backs on Victorian convention in favour of personal relationships and pleasure, the very choice Forster hands Lucy.

The 1985 film A Room with a View made famous use of the aria O mio babbino caro, by which Italian composer?

Puccini wrote it for Gianni Schicchi, a comic opera that is itself set in Florence, where a daughter pleads with her father over the boy she loves.

In E. M. Forster's novel A Room with a View, George first kisses Lucy on a hillside covered in which flowers?

Violets pour down the hillside where George kisses her in the book. The 1985 film moved the kiss to a poppy field instead.

In A Room with a View, Lucy is stranded with no guidebook outside which great Franciscan church in Florence?

Santa Croce holds the tombs of Michelangelo and Galileo, yet with no guide to hand Lucy cannot tell what she is meant to admire, until the Emersons take her round.

In A Room with a View, a carriage outing to which hill town above Florence ends with George kissing Lucy?

Fiesole is where Lucy's shaky Italian misleads her carriage driver: asked to find the vicar, he delivers her straight to George instead.

What is the name of the Honeychurch family home, built by Lucy's late father, in A Room with a View?

Windy Corner was put up as a speculation by Lucy's father, a local solicitor, who fell for his own creation and ended up living in it himself.

In A Room with a View, Lucy returns from Italy to her family's home in which county south of London?

Surrey was also home to Forster himself, who finished all six of his novels in Weybridge. The 1985 film, though, shot its English scenes over the border in Kent.

Which actor, Marcus Brody in the Indiana Jones films, was Oscar-nominated as Mr Emerson in A Room with a View?

Denholm Elliott played the blunt, big-hearted father who offers two strangers his room. He lost the Oscar to Michael Caine in Hannah and Her Sisters.

Which actor, later Gareth in Four Weddings and a Funeral, played the Reverend Mr Beebe in A Room with a View?

Simon Callow had been the director's pick for an earlier film but was tied to a West End play. As the vicar he strips off for the famous swim in the woods.

Which E. M. Forster novel, his next after A Room with a View, won Emma Thompson an Oscar when filmed in 1992?

Howards End was filmed by the same team that made A Room with a View, and its house is modelled on Rooks Nest, where Forster spent his childhood.

In A Room with a View, the Signora who runs Lucy's Italian pensione dismays her by speaking with which accent?

Cockney vowels are the last thing Lucy expected to hear in Florence, and with English guests at every table she complains that she might as well be in London.

In A Room with a View, Lucy's stormy playing of which composer convinces the vicar that she has hidden depths?

Beethoven's final sonata, Opus 111, is what the vicar first heard her attack at a parish entertainment, where he had expected something far tamer.

What name do the Honeychurches give the woodland pond where Freddy, George and the vicar bathe in A Room with a View?

The Sacred Lake is little more than a puddle, as Lucy admits. For the 1985 film the crew dug an artificial pond in the woods to stage the naked swim.

In A Room with a View, which English chaplain in Florence orders the carriage driver's sweetheart off the box?

Mr Eager makes the young lovers part, and old Mr Emerson, seated beside him in the carriage, protests that parting two happy people is no triumph at all.

In A Room with a View, George Emerson works in which industry, an answer that makes Charlotte wince when she asks?

The railways employ George as a clerk, which sets Miss Lavish laughing that he looks just like a porter. His father had worked in journalism before retiring.

In A Room with a View, what is Cecil doing in the garden when Lucy and George recognise their own secret kiss?

Reading aloud from a trashy romance in order to mock it, Cecil has no idea that the book is by Miss Lavish, or that Charlotte fed her the scene it describes.

In E. M. Forster's novel A Room with a View, what gets squashed between Cecil and Lucy during their clumsy first kiss?

His pince-nez is knocked loose and flattened between them, moments after he has formally asked permission. Cecil himself judges the embrace a failure.

Which actor played Mr Emerson opposite his real-life son Rafe as George in ITV's 2007 A Room with a View?

Timothy Spall and Rafe had never acted together before. Another of the cast, Timothy West, had co-directed a West End stage version of the book back in 1975.

E. M. Forster, who wrote A Room with a View, was nominated in 22 separate years for which award he never won?

The Nobel Prize eluded him every time. Forster was choosy about honours in any case: he turned down a knighthood in 1949, though he later accepted the Order of Merit.

The 1985 film A Room with a View won Oscars for its screenplay, its art direction and which other craft?

Costume design brought Jenny Beavan the first of her Oscars, shared with John Bright. Decades later she won again for Mad Max: Fury Road and Cruella.

Which German-born novelist won the first of her two screenwriting Oscars for the 1985 film A Room with a View?

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala married an Indian architect and spent years writing novels in Delhi before turning to screenplays. She wrote two drafts of this one, with the director rewriting in between.

Which New Zealand soprano sings the Italian opera arias heard on the soundtrack of the 1985 film A Room with a View?

Kiri Te Kanawa was already a household name: four years earlier a television audience of hundreds of millions had watched her sing at the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana.

Which actor, later the star of the horror film Warlock, played George Emerson in the 1985 film A Room with a View?

Julian Sands came back to the story 34 years later, playing George's father, old Mr Emerson, in a 2019 audio production recorded in Los Angeles.

Which actor, later Inspector Lestrade in the BBC's Sherlock, made his film debut as Freddy in A Room with a View?

Rupert Graves became a Forster regular: after playing Lucy's brother he appeared in the films of Maurice and Where Angels Fear to Tread.

Which English playwright borrowed the name of A Room with a View for a hit song he wrote in 1928?

Noël Coward wrote the song for his revue This Year of Grace, and freely acknowledged that he had lifted its name from Forster's novel.

Which band named two of its albums, including Victory for the Comic Muse, after a line in A Room with a View?

The Divine Comedy began with a debut called Fanfare for the Comic Muse, echoing Cecil's boast after he installs the Emersons in the village, and reused the phrase years later.

In A Room with a View, what has George scrawled on the paper Charlotte finds pinned up in his old room?

A question mark, which Forster calls a note of interrogation, is all the sheet holds. Charlotte finds it oddly menacing: it stands for George's brooding over what life is for.

In A Room with a View, which childhood illness of George's did his mother blame on his never being baptised?

Typhoid struck George at twelve, and a clergyman convinced his mother it was a punishment. Her guilt destroyed her, which is the truth behind the gossip that Mr Emerson murdered his wife.

In Forster's 1958 afterword to A Room with a View, what does George become during the First World War?

A conscientious objector, George loses his government job and is given non-combatant duties to keep him out of prison. Forster took the same stand himself, serving with the Red Cross in Egypt.

What did E. M. Forster call his 1958 afterword on the later lives of Lucy Honeychurch and George Emerson?

A View without a Room has George return to Florence decades later and find the view still there, though he cannot track down the old pensione.

Which Cambridge college inherited the rights to E. M. Forster's novels, including A Room with a View, when he died?

King's had been Forster's own college, and he lived there as an honorary fellow in old age. Its executor turned down every film offer for ten years after his death.

What is the name of the Florence pensione where Lucy and Charlotte first meet the Emersons in A Room with a View?

The Bertolini was modelled on the Pensione Simi, where Forster and his mother stayed in 1901. The 1985 film shot its version at the Pensione Quisisana.

Which feature of E. M. Forster's novel appears as painted captions in the 1985 film A Room with a View?

Its chapter headings appear on painted cards between scenes. The filmmakers had an artist base them on the wall decorations of one of the Florence locations.