An Affair to Remember and Kerr's other 1957 release, Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, made Kerr the most in-demand actress in Hollywood.

The film's title song, "An Affair to Remember (Our Love Affair)" was a major hit for Vic Damone, holding a place on the Hit Parade for 16 weeks. It became a standard recorded by such artists as Nat King Cole, Dinah Washington, Johnny Mathis and Frank Sinatra.

In his last film, Walk, Don't Run (1966), Cary Grant sings a bit of An Affair to Remember's title song.

The film's title has provided the titles for episodes of Spin City and Gilmore Girls. Puns on the title have also provided episode titles, with the most popular being "An Affair to Forget" (The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Laverne & Shirley, Three's Company, Who's the Boss?, Wings, Frasier and Boy Meets World). Other variations include "A Non-Affair to Remember" (The Jeff Foxworthy Show), "An Affair to Dismember" (The Nanny), "A Divorce to Remember" (Just Shoot Me) and "A Fair to Remember" (The New Adventures of Old Christine).

The married couple played by Kate Jackson and Michael Ontkean in Making Love (1982) parrot the dialogue along with the film while watching it on TV.

An Affair to Remember was a major influence on Nora Ephron's Sleepless in Seattle (1993). Not only did leading lady Meg Ryan and her best friend, Rosie O'Donnell, consider the film the height of screen romance and watch it on tape while sobbing their eyes out, but the final meeting between Ryan and Tom Hanks occurs at the top of the Empire State Building, where Terry and Nickie planned to meet in An Affair to Remember. The success of Sleepless in Seattle brought An Affair to Remember a new generation of fans and led to an additional two million sales for the film on VHS.

Director Glenn Gordon Caron remade the film -- under the original title, Love Affair -- in 1994. Real-life married couple Warren Beatty and Annette Bening took over the leads, with Katharine Hepburn as Beatty's grandmother. The film did not do well at the box office.

The 1999 Bollywood film Mann borrows the shipboard romance and the waiting period afterwards from An Affair to Remember. Aamir Khan and Manisha Koirala play roles inspired by those of Grant and Kerr.

In Touch of Pink (2004), which depicts Grant's ghost (played by Kyle MacLachlan) as an advisor to an Indian gay man, An Affair to Remember plays on the TV.

by Frank Miller