Ivory films Madhur Jaffrey was instrumental in introducing James Ivory and Ismail Merchant to one another. When Merchant and Ivory went to India to make The Householder (1963) they met Shashi Kapoor and his in-laws, the Kendals. Geoffrey Kendal and his wife, Laura Liddell, had a traveling theatre company, Shakespeareana, that performed plays by Shakespeare pan India. Combining the Jaffreys' original idea with the real-life Shakespeareana, Merchant and Ivory came up with their next film Shakespeare Wallah (1965). Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was persuaded to write a movie star role for Madhur. Saeed was dropped from the project because the Jaffreys' marriage had collapsed at this point. When Madhur travelled to India for the shooting of Shakespeare Wallah, her first shots were in Kasauli, a hill station. The hairpin bends on the drive there caused her nausea and vomiting, leading the crew to despair that a person so petite and sickly could ever play a glamorous film star. Kenneth Tynan, a film critic for The Observer, described her performance as "a ravishing study in felinity". She went on to act in further Merchant Ivory films like The Guru (1969), Autobiography of a Princess (1976), Heat and Dust (1983), directed by Ivory, and The Perfect Murder (1988). She starred as the title character in their film Cotton Mary (1999) and co-directed it with Merchant. Other films and television Madhur Jaffrey has appeared in Six Degrees of Separation (1993), Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), Flawless (1999) and Prime (2005). She starred in and produced ABCD (1999) and guest-starred in the Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode "Name" as a psychiatrist, and the Law & Order: Criminal Intent episode "The Healer" as a lecturer. In 1985, she was in the Hindi film Saagar where she played the role of Kamladevi, Rishi Kapoor's grandmother. In 1992–94, she appeared with Billie Whitelaw in the British television series Firm Friends. In 1999, she appeared with daughter Sakina Jaffrey in the film Chutney Popcorn. In Cosmopolitan (2003), a film broadcast on PBS, she played a traditional Hindu wife who suddenly leaves her husband. She also starred alongside Deborah Kerr in the 1985 movie The Assam Garden. In 2009 she appeared with Aasif Mandvi in Today's Special, adapted from Mandvi's play about a sous chef who is forced to run his father's tandoori restaurant in Queens. In 2012 she played a doctor in A Late Quartet who diagnoses