BY GENE TRIPLETT
For a child of Britain’s realist film movement, where budgets and shooting schedules were as tight as a railroad timetable, the epic and sumptuous sprawl of “Doctor Zhivago” was a 
revelation.
Rita Tushingham was only 18 when she’d made her auspicious screen debut in Tony Richardson’s prize-winning drama “A Taste of Honey” in 1961 and had appeared in only four more modestly financed but critically lauded films when she was chosen to play the illegitimate daughter of a Russian poet-doctor (Omar Sharif) and a political activist’s wife (Julie Christie) in David Lean’s sweeping screen adaptation of Boris Pasternak’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the Bolshevik Revolution.
“The experience was very different from what I’d obviously had before, because they were low-budget British films,” Tushingham said in a recent phone interview from London, where she was promoting the 45th anniversary release of Lean’s film on DVD and Blu-ray.
Rita Tushingham and Alec Guinness in a scene from "Doctor Zhivago."
The Liverpool-born actress had worked with such young British lions of the directorial world as Richardson, Basil Dearden (“A Place to Go,” 1963), Sidney Furie (“The Leather Boys,” 1964), Desmond Davis (“Girl With Green Eyes,” 1964) and Richard Lester (“The Knack … and How to Get It,” 1965) in the hippest of shoestring-financed art house features, and had made quite a name for herself with most-promising newcomer awards from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) and the Golden Globes, and best actress honors at the 1961 Cannes Film Festival.
But working for Lean, Oscar-winning director of such gold-plated, major-studio productions as “The Bridge on the River Kwai” 
and “Lawrence of Arabia,” was a whole new first-class train ride.
“It was a much slower process, because you would sit and (Lean) would sort of discuss what he wanted with the crew, and he’d talk about it and maybe block out the scene and not shoot every day,” Tushingham said. “And it was a very different way of doing it. You didn’t feel like you had to get so many minutes in the can every day. And I thought suddenly, ‘Well, what happened here? Is something wrong? We’re going quite slowly.’ And that was the way he worked, and he had that luxury of being able to do that.”
Unlike Geraldine Chaplin, who had to audition for the part of Zhivago’s wife, Tushingham wasn’t required to submit to a screen test to land the part she played.
“I found out I was playing it while I was shooting ‘The Knack,’” she recalled. “Someone brought in a paper and said, ‘Ooh, you’re in David Lean’s next film, I see.’ And I said, ‘Am I?’ And that was it.”
Tushingham had become something of an iconic figure in the British hipster circles of the early ’60s, sharing the swinging English nightlife with such newly established luminaries as Albert Finney, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Tom Courtenay, her close friend Lynn Redgrave (who died shortly after this interview was conducted), and fellow Liverpudlians John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and George Harrison.
Harrison, in fact, grew up just down the road from Tushingham.
“I think I’m not wrong that he was an altar boy and he was the butcher boy,” Tushingham said. “He certainly delivered orders on his bike.”
But aside from having close friends in starry places, she also was gifted with an unconventionally striking and expressive visage — sometimes plain, other times pretty in an offbeat sort of way — with large, soulful blue eyes that made her perfect as the daughter of Zhivago, as played by Sharif.
“It might have helped, I really don’t know,” Tushingham speculated. “Because Omar’s got the most beautiful, watery, deep eyes, hasn’t he? It’s lovely. And Julie was, to me, just absolutely stunning.”
Before viewing the newly restored and remastered Blu-ray version of “Doctor Zhivago,” it had been many years since she’d seen the film.
“Isn’t it stunning?” she asked. “And the color, it’s so rich, isn’t it? It’s just beautiful, I think. Freddie Young, the cinematographer, did a beautiful job.”
Adapted for the screen by Robert Bolt (“A Man for All Seasons”), and photographed against the snowy expanses of Finland, Canada and the mountainous regions of Spain (since the Soviet Union would not allow filming there), “Doctor Zhivago” tells an intimate and emotional story of love and indomitable human spirit in the midst of the cataclysmic Russian Revolution.
Sharif plays the title character, who is married to the aristocratic Tonya (Chaplin) but is also in love with Lara (Christie), a nurse whose life has been destroyed by tragedy. War and revolution repeatedly bring him together with each woman only to be separated again as he struggles to survive the conflict within him and around him and keep his loved ones safe.
The memorable score by Maurice Jarre won one of five Oscars bestowed on the film (the others were for screenplay, art direction, costume design and cinematography) out of 10 nominations in all.
“I think it’s a film that from the very beginning, as soon as you hear the music, you’re taken into it,” Tushingham said. “And it’s a wonderful love story. I think you should just let the film wash over you. And there’s so much on the screen, too. It’s an epic, and it’s just wonderful to watch. You rarely get those now. Apart from the fact that there isn’t the money, there aren’t the directors. There are obviously, of course, a few. But it’s just a complete film, in my opinion.”
Best known for its low-budget gothic horror movies with deceptively sumptuous-looking period sets and the distinguished presences of Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and other top British and American actors in lead roles, England’s Hammer Films also was adept at producing Hitchcockian psychological thrillers that were remarkably well-written, directed and acted at even lower production costs than its Frankenstein and Dracula series.
