Doctor Zhivago at 50: How a timeless love story blossomed

It’s one of the greatest love stories in the history of filmmaking. If you’ve ever been in love, and loved and lost, it’s guaranteed to make you weep.

Seeing Doctor Zhivago in the cinema is an unforgettable experience. It takes you back to a time before DVD and YouTube, when going to see a movie was a grand theatrical event. It starts with an orchestral overture. It includes an interval. It runs for three hours and twenty minutes, yet, like the steam trains that carry its characters across an icy Russia, it seems to hurtle past.

Even if you’ve never seen the movie, you probably know the story: Doctor Zhivago’s comfortable life in Moscow is thrown into chaos by the First World War and the Russian Revolution.

Throughout this violent turmoil he remains besotted by Lara, a wronged heroic woman whom he loves but barely knows.

Every event conspires against them, yet fate keeps throwing them together. Will their love survive the Revolution? Or will history destroy them?

Doctor Zhivago is a timeless tale, outliving the era when it was set and the era when it was made. Omar Sharif and Julie Christie were born to play Zhivago and Lara - even though neither of them seems remotely Russian.

Rod Steiger is a mesmeric baddie, and the supporting cast features some of the best British actors of the age: Tom Courtenay, Alec Guinness, Ralph Richardson, Rita Tushingham... Though the studio was American, it was essentially a British movie.

The screenplay was by Robert Bolt, author of A Man for All Seasons. It was directed by Britain’s greatest film director, David Lean. Doctor Zhivago married the grandeur of Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia with the intimacy of his Brief Encounter.

And the story of its origins was almost as dramatic as the film.

The only novel ever written by the Russian poet Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago was banned in the Soviet Union - not only for its criticism of the Revolution, but for championing individuals rather than the Party and the State.

In 1957 Pasternak was visited in Moscow by the Italian journalist Sergio d’Angelo. Pasternak gave d’Angelo his unpublished manuscript, and the journalist smuggled it out of Russia on rolls of microfilm. D’Angelo took it back to Italy, where it was published, to great acclaim.

The USSR denounced the book, but despite their disapproval (or perhaps, in part, because of it), it quickly became an international hit. Its popularity was boosted by the CIA, who bought up numerous copies, and distributed them worldwide. They even produced a special pocket sized version to distribute behind the Iron Curtain.

Doctor Zhivago was a great novel which would have won plaudits in any circumstances, but at the height of the Cold War its propaganda value was immense.

In 1958, Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Khrushchev told him that if he travelled to Oslo to receive the award, he would be barred from returning to his beloved Russia (like Zhivago, Pasternak loved Russia, in spite of all its woes).

Under intense pressure from the USSR, Pasternak declined the honour. He died in 1960, aged seventy, five years before the film was made.

The film got a mixed press in America. Time and Life were keen, and the LA Times was full of praise, but Pauline Kael called it ‘primitive, admired by the same sort of people who are delighted when a stage has running water.’

‘Mr Bolt has reduced the vast upheaval of the Russian Revolution to the banalities of a doomed romance,’ moaned the New York Times.

The critical response was similarly mixed in Britain. Kenneth Tynan was critical of Lean. Sight & Sound were damning. BAFTA gave the movie no awards.

However the public loved it, on both sides of the Atlantic, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences followed suit. At the 1966 Oscars, the film was nominated for ten awards. It won five, for Best Screenplay, Music, Costume, Art Direction and Cinematography.

‘It’s a wonderful love story and it looks so beautiful – the costumes, the sets, everything about it is breathtaking,’ says Rita Tushingham, who played Lara’s daughter in the opening and closing scenes of the film.

‘I’ve never been in a film like that again. The whole atmosphere, the music - everything works, the jigsaw fits, everything fits on the screen.’

And the man who made it fit together was David Lean.

‘He knew what he wanted,’ says Rita. ‘I know some people didn’t work that easily with him. They thought he didn’t like actors. I honestly didn’t have any problems with him at all.’

‘He didn’t like talking heads,’ recalls Tom Courtenay, who played Lara’s husband. ‘He was very particular about how it would look, and he was prepared to wait to get the look right.’

And he nearly always got it. ‘He shot as he saw it, because he was editing it in his mind.’

‘The wonderful thing about Zhivago is it won’t date,’ says Rita. ‘It’s amazing how many people remember it.’

‘People ask me about it again and again and again, and it grows in my memory,’ concurs Tom.

And this year’s rerelease seems especially timely, after Omar Sharif, the film’s star, died earlier this year.

‘He had that charisma when he entered a room,’ recalls Rita, fondly, of her old friend Omar. ‘He was a very beautiful man.’

Extracts and stills from Doctor Zhivago courtesy BFI / Warner Bros. Pictures.

Doctor Zhivago opens in cinemas UK-wide from 27 November as part of BFI LOVE. Sir Tom Courtenay and Rita Tushingham take part in a Q&A after the 6.30pm screening at BFI Southbank on Friday 27 November.