CREDITS LOVE STORY , 1970 dir: Arthur Hiller Ryan O'Neal Ali MacGraw Ray Milland Tommy Lee Jones

"‘What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died? That she was beautiful and brilliant? That she loved Mozart and Bach, the Beatles, and me? ”

Rich kid Oliver Barrett IV (Ryan O'Neal) gives up the family fortune to marry working class student Jennifer Cavalleri (Ali McGraw), but it's a bad deal as she's dying from one of those mysterious Hollywood diseases devoid of visible symptoms.

Oliver and Jennifer meet at Harvard, Cambridge, Massachusetts, where scenes were filmed at Harvard Yard and Tercentuary Theatre. Along with the sequel, Oliver's Story, legal drama The Paper Chase and misfiring comedy Soul Man, it's one of the few features actually filmed on the hallowed campus. Good Will Hunting features Harvard buidlings, though most of the film was shot in Toronto. And, apart from a couple of establishing shots, the Harvard-set Legally Blonde was filmed in LA, mainly in Pasadena. Similarly, raucus comedies Road Trip and Old School incorporate second unit shots of the campus.

Harvard subway station is minutes away from Boston Downtown on the MBTA Red Line (Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority).

Love Story location: the college campus: Harvard Yard, Cambridge

The intimidatingly grand mansion belonging to Oliver Barrett III (Ray Milland), Oliver's unbending father, is the Phipps Estate House, Old Westbury Gardens, 71 Old Westbury Road on Long Island (seen in Alfred Hitchcock's North By Northwest, among other movies), though the gate leading to it is that of Planting Fields, on Long Island.

After their DIY marriage, Oliver and Jennifer set up home in a modest woodframe house at 119 Oxford Street, Cambridge, near to the Harvard campus. It's on the doorstep here that Jennifer gets to utter the film's immortal tagline “Love means never having to say you're sorry”.

After graduation, the couple move to New York City. The skating scene is at the Wollman Skating Rink in Central Park. When Jennifer is taken ill, they catch a cab by Central Park opposite the Hotel Pierre.