影片的原著是1957年俄国作家鲍里斯·帕斯捷尔纳克创作的长篇小说《日瓦戈医生》,该书在意大利出版以后,轰动了整个世界。一九五八年鲍里斯·帕斯捷尔纳克被授予了诺贝尔文学奖,但作家在自己的祖国遭到了严厉的批判,并被迫放弃了诺贝尔文学奖。 A powerful, sweeping movie that makes a character out of the Russian landscape, Doctor Zhivago is about a man broken by the times he inhabits. Set around the time of the Bolshevik Revolution .The main players - Zhivago, a good doctor; Tonya, a faithful wife; and Lara, a beauty who steals men´s hearts. The film tells the story of Yuri Zhivago (Omar Sharif). We learn his story form his half brother, Yevgraf Zhivago (Alec Guinness), a general and official in the USSR .He´s questioning a young woman (Rita Tushingham) about her origins, believing that the young woman is his niece. We learn that the young Yuri Zhivago is orphaned by his mother´s friends.
Yuri Zhivago becomes a doctor, but at heart he´s a poet . He marries Tonya (Geraldine Chaplin), the daughter of the people who raised him and has a daughter . He also becomes smitten with Lara (Julie Christie), who is the wife of Pasha (Tom Courtney), a man who later becomes a revolutionary and the unwilling lover of Victor Komarovsky (Rod Steiger), a lawyer and expert at survival.
Yuri and Lara become lovers and he ends up writing beautiful verse about her. The film is more than just a story of a love triangle. It´s set in the World War I and early Bolshevik era and throughout the film we see people make difficult choices just to survive. The fact that Yuri is both a doctor who cares for the sick and a poet who cares for the heart is meant to show the triumph of the human spirit in the midst of tragedy.