Pop Culture 101 - DOCTOR ZHIVAGO

Doctor Zhivago's costumes inspired the "Zhivago Look" for designers like Yves St. Laurent and Christian Dior. Fur trims, silk braiding and boots came back into fashion thanks to the film.

Also returned to fashion by the film's success was facial hair. Beards and mustaches were in, just in time for the counter-culture revolution of the late '60s.

Maurice Jarre's soundtrack album for Doctor Zhivago was one of the best-selling film soundtracks of all time, selling more than 600,000 copies.

The film's popular theme, "Lara's Theme (Somewhere, My Love)," has traveled around the world. Jarre claims to have heard it everywhere from a gondola in Italy to Central Africa, where it was played on tribal instruments.

If you or someone you know were born after 1965 and are named "Lara" (spelled as such), you can thank Doctor Zhivago. Until the film' s success, the name was rarely found outside of Russia.

Four documentaries have tried to capture the gargantuan production that brought Doctor Zhivago to the screen. Three short films from 1965 -- David Lean's Film of Doctor Zhivago," Zhivago: Behind the Camera With David Lean and Moscow in Madrid -- were little more than extended promotional pieces for the film. A longer film made for television in 1995, "Doctor Zhivago: The Making of a Russian Epic," features narration by Omar Sharif. It includes interviews with Robert Bolt, Geraldine Chaplin, Maurice Jarre, Rod Steiger and Olga Ivinskaya, the woman on whom Boris Pasternak based the character of Lara. It is currently included with the supplementary materials on the DVD of the film.

In 2002, Doctor Zhivago became a miniseries in Great Britain. Newcomers Hans Matheson and Keira Knightley (later the star of Pirates of the Caribbean and Love Actually, both 2003) played Zhivago and Lara. Like the classic film version, the production was not shot in the Soviet Union. The closest the crew got was Prague and Slovakia. It aired in the U.S. on PBS outlets in 2003 to mixed reviews.

by Frank Miller