How could he do this to Lara?

Until recently I considered Andrew Davies a virtuoso screenwriter. I adored his adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and similarly lapped up his Trollope's The Way We Live Now.

So, initially, I greeted the news that he was to adapt Dr Zhivago for the small screen with enthusiasm. Who better to do justice to my great-uncle Boris Pasternak's literary classic?

With his deft touch, Davies was bound to bring one of the most enduring love stories of the 20th century successfully back into popular culture, introducing a new generation to Pasternak's Nobel prizewinning work.

So, it was with horror that I discovered that, not content to stick to the original text, Davies has decided to stamp the £7 million production indelibly as his own, with what smacks to me as the very commercialisation and sensation that Boris Pasternak abhorred.

Firstly, he has introduced gratuitous sex scenes and such a degree of nudity that Andrea Corr, lead singer of The Corrs, turned down the coveted role of Lara. Davies claims that the new sex scenes are "scarcely avoidable" in today's climate, but surely that is to miss the very essence of Dr Zhivago? The love affair between Yuri Zhivago and his mistress, Lara, is magical precisely because so much is left to the imagination. Davies has already illustrated only too well that you can convey deep romantic love without sex - there were no naked bodies in Pride and Prejudice, and yet it was utterly romantic and memorable.

Secondly, and far more heinous a crime, is the fact that Davies has taken a scalpel and butchered the ending. Not content with the authentic ending, when Zhivago dies of a heart attack pursuing the woman he believes to be Lara, Davies says: "I have written an entirely new ending which I believe viewers will find both heartbreaking and heart-warming."

FRANKLY, I am staggered by his conceit. I would have thought that it was enough of a tall order for Davies to follow in the footsteps of David Lean's superb Oscar-winning film, let alone to start playing God with the text. Maybe he feels that as he is unlikely to better Robert Bolt's screenplay, for which Bolt won an Academy award, he won't enter into competition but will run a completely different race? I fail to see how he can better Lean's classic, yet to add insult to injury, Davies has written off the stars who captured our hearts - Julie Christie and Omar Sharif - as "rather wooden".

For the past six months, I have been doing my own research into the life of my great-uncle and I know one thing for sure: Boris Pasternak would be absolutely outraged by Davies's turn of events. He died in 1960, five years before Lean's film came out, but my grandparents considered the whole brouhaha over the movie shocking enough. They felt that having the spotlight on stars like Christie and Sharif detracted from Boris and the body of written work of which they were so proud. My mother managed to persuade my grandfather, Frederick, to see the film with her in Oxford, but not long after the opening credits had gone up, he cried: "This is not Russia!" and left. "No," said my mother, "it was filmed in Spain."

You might think that as a relative of such a famous writer, I grew up steeped in Pasternak family lore. Not a bit of it. Due to my father's painful modesty, Boris was almost a dirty word in our house. It was considered as vulgar to discuss our surname as it was to mention money. When my mother was asked incessantly if she was related to Pasternak, she always replied blandly: "Yes. I'm married to him." I got snippets of information while visiting my grandmother, Josephine, who was Boris's sister - she kept the surname as she married a Pasternak cousin - but recently have been fascinated reading Boris's correspondence.

The reason I feel so strongly about Dr Zhivago being sexed-up for television is that it is at complete odds with the man Boris was and his views on life and love. Emotional, impassioned, melodramatic and ruled by his heart he may have been, but nowhere is there any evidence to suggest that he was obsessed by sex. He had two great loves of his life: his second wife Zinaida Neigaus and later his mistress and muse, Olga Ivinskaya, who form the basis of the characters Tonya and Lara, between whom Yuri Zhivago is torn.

When Boris met Zinaida in 1929, she was the wife of the eminent concert pianist Genrikh Neigaus. Listening to Genrikh play, Pasternak believed that his talent must have been fuelled by the love of Zinaida. Although married to his first wife, Evgenia Lurye, an artist, Boris was so impressed by Zinaida's strain of practical domesticity that they began an affair. When she refused to leave her husband, a distraught Boris swallowed a bottle of iodine in a weak suicide attempt. Zinaida poured milk down him to induce vomiting and probably saved his life. It is a mark of how revered Boris Pasternak was that Genrikh turned to his wife and said "Well, are you satisfied? Has he now proved his love for you?î and agreed to hand her over to the poet.

IN 1937, ensconced in the writers' colony of Peredelkino outside Moscow, Boris wrote to his parents of his emotional stability. "I now possess the nucleus, the blinding nucleus of what can be called happiness. It lies in that amazing, gradually accumulating manuscript." It took him well over two decades to write Dr Zhivago - finally published in the West in 1957 - so he would hardly have been happy to have the end tampered with, would he?

As he was creating Zhivago, his affair blossomed with Ivinskaya, a soulmate 22 years his junior. "Life became converted into art and art was born of life and experience," he wrote.

In her autobiography, Ivinskaya recalls a day in 1954 when Boris phoned her from Peredelkino. "Sounding shaken, he began to speak in a voice choked by tears. 'What's wrong?' I asked in alarm. 'He's dead, he's dead, I say!' he groaned several times over. It turned out that he was talking about the death of Zhivago: this harrowing chapter was now finished."

All high drama, but the point is that Pasternak cared deeply about the form of his work. His risked death under the Stalinist regime to tell his truth, was forced to renounce the Nobel Prize for the "anti-Soviet" nature of the book, and was subsequently expelled from the Union of Writers. With loneliness borne of great courage, he suffered immensely for his art. Shouldn't Andrew Davies have the decency to respect that and stay true to Pasternak's vision?