Somewhere My Love

David Lean, the director of the 1965 movie Dr. Zhavago, was originally going to use a popular Russian song as a theme for Julie Christie’s character Lara, but was never able to discover who owned the rights to the tune he wanted. Instead, he asked composer Maurice Jarre to produce an original theme. After several unsatisfactory attempts, Lean suggested that Jarre take his girlfriend to the mountains and not return until he’d written a love theme. Lean liked the resulting melody so much, he used it to replace much of the rest of the music Jarre had already written for the movie. Two years later Connie Francis commissioned Paul Francis Webster to write words to the tune, but once they were finished she decided they were too corny. By the time she changed her mind (again), Ray Coniff had already recorded his own version of “Somewhere My Love.”