The Wall Street Journal Monday carried a story on its front page about the fading relationship between Bollywood and the Swiss mountains. Read the piece in full here, Bollywood’s Big-Screen Love Affair With Switzerland Fades to Black. Yash Chopra, the Bollywood auteur who popularized Switzerland as the backdrop for Indian romances, began his love affair with the Alpine country during his honeymoon there more than 40 years ago. Mr. Chopra and his wife Pamela, an amateur singer who later performed songs for his some of his films, journeyed to Switzerland in  1970 after getting married . They marveled at its majestic peaks and lush valleys, which would later become an important visual seed. Over the course of a more than 50-year career, Mr. Chopra, who died in October 2012, produced or directed ten movies in Switzerland, turning its mountains and meadows into symbols of a pristine and picturesque life beyond South Asia. As Mr. Chopra’s films, notably 1989’s “Chandni” and 1993’s “Darr,” became matinee mainstays, other Indian directors trekked to Swiss glaciers, hoping to capture some of that stardust. “He was the big daddy of them all,” said Ashwin Merchant, deputy director of Swiss Business Hub India in Mumbai. “So people followed.” The son of an accountant, Mr. Chopra was the youngest of eight children. Though his family initially prodded him to become an engineer, Mr. Chopra’s older brother, an established Bollywood filmmaker, helped him secure his first directing gig.

Mr. Chopra eventually established his own film company, Yash Raj Films, where he honed a story-telling technique that revolved around heroines, glamorous lifestyles and romance. Part of that style: elaborate song-and-dance routines set in Switzerland that transported his audiences to a world they could only dream of. “To many South Asians, a Yash Chopra movie was their passport to a world outside the one they inhabit,” according to a biography on his studio’s website. Mr. Chopra was planning to retire after completing his latest romance, “Jab Tak Hai Jaan,” or “As Long as I Live,” which was released last year. The director had intended to shoot one last sequence for the love story in Switzerland, but died after contracting pneumonia and dengue fever. Yash Raj Films, Mr. Chopra’s company, didn’t follow through on the director’s hoped-for Swiss shoot. Instead, it ran a montage of shots of Mr. Chopra over the closing credits of the film. The montage was deemed more appropriate as a tribute “than a song sequence shot in Switzerland or anywhere else,” a studio spokesman said. Mr. Chopra’s fans, however, can still experience the director’s connection with Switzerland. Interlaken’s Victoria Jungfrau Grand Hotel offers visitors the opportunity to stay in the $2,000-per-night “Yash Chopra Suite.”