Top Director-Actor Teams?
by HELEN GEIB
This post at Anomalous Material on director-actor partnerships got me thinking about great filmmaking teams. Like John Woo and Chow Yun-fat (pictured above in Woo’s delirious, no holds barred Hong Kong actioner Hard Boiled). The only ground rule for this game: they must have made at least three movies together.
What’s your list of cinema’s greatest director and actor teams?
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Here are some that come off the top of my head:
1.) John Wayne and John Ford
2.) Blake Edwards and Peter Sellers
3.) Alfred Hitchcock and James Stewart
4.) Woody Allen and Diane Keaton
5.) Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell
More to come when I can think of them.
Of course, how could I have forgotten this one:
1.) Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski
The two made some fantastic movies together, but literally tried to kill each other in the process. The documentary about their relationship ‘My Best Friends” is almost unbelievable.
How could I forget the classic teams from Italian cinema:
1.) Fredrico Fellini and Marcello Mastroianni
2.) Lina Wertmuller and Giancarlo Giannini
3.) Vittorio De Sica and Sophia Loren
There is also:
1.) Frank Capra and James Stewart
2.) Elia Kazan and Marlon Brando
3.) David Lean and Alec Guinness
4.) Steven Spielberg and Richard Dreyfuss
5.) Michael Winner and Charles Bronson
6.) Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly
and of course the greatest team of all:
7.) Hal Needham and Burt Reynolds (okay I’m joking with that one)
Kurosawa and Mifune
Scorsese and De Niro
Brooks and Wilder
Those are great choices. Kurosawa’s work with Takashi Shimura and Tatsuya Nakadai also produced some remarkable films.
Nice going everybody, now I have nothing to post! lol
Ooh! Scorsese and DiCaprio! Ha!
Melville and Alain Delon
DeMille and Gloria Swanson
Okay guys, here is what I’d like to think is the definitive list of all famous actors and directors who worked together in at least 3 movies. I am not including any names already mentioned in any of the previous posts. If you can come up with any others you are free to add to it. Here goes:
1.) James Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger
2.) Carl Reiner and Steve Martin
3.) John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands
4.) Jon Roach and Mike Myers
5.) Joseph Losey and Dirk Bogarde
6.) Quinten Tarantino and Uma Thurman
7.) Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson
8.) Robert Zemeckis and Tom Hanks
9.) Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov
10.) Tim Burton and Johnny Depp
11.) Joel Coen and George Clooney
12.) George Stevens and Elizabeth Taylor
13.) David Zucker and Leslie Nielson
14.)Bob Rafelson and Jack Nicholson
15.) Stanley Kramer and Spencer Tracy
16.) Mark Rydell and James Caan
17.) Arthur Penn and Gene Hackman
18.) Don Siegel and Clint Eastwood
19.) John Huston and Humphrey Bogart
Continued:
20.) John Frankenheimer and Burt Lancaster
21.) Sidney Lumet and Sean Connery
22.) Ken Russell and Glenda Jackson
23.) Stuart Gordon and Jeffrey Combs
24.) Howard Hawks and Cary Grant
25.) Henry Hathaway and John Wayne
26.) Igmar Bergman and Max Von Sydow
27.) Sydney Pollack and Robert Redford
28.) John schleisinger and Julie Christie
29.) John Carpenter and Kurt Russell
30.) Robert Altman and Elliott Gould
31.) Harold Ramis and Bill Murray
And there is still more:
32.) Billy Wilder and Jack Lemmon
33.) George Roy Hill and Paul Newman
34.) Alan J. Pakula and Jane Fonda
One last one:
35.) The legendary pairing of John R. Cherry III and Jim Varney, who did all the ERNEST movies together. Can’t forget them!!
Ooops, I forgot two:
36.) Peter Bogdanovich and Cybil Shepard
37.) Martin Ritt and Paul Newman
Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten.
Bam!
Richard, lots of good combinations there but I think the challenge was to name “great” collaborations, significant creative partnerships. I’ll challenge you to choose the ‘great’ five from your list.
Wong Kar-wai and…
-Leslie Cheung
-Tony Leung Chiu-wai
-Maggie Cheung
(I couldn’t pick just one from that group)
@Richard: I’ve unleashed a monster
@Miriam: DeMille and Swanson- I like it! More silent partnerships: Griffith and Gish, Browning and Chaney
@Nir: good one :D
Yes, Miriam, I realize that the idea was to pick just 5, but when I started to think of all of them I thought it would be fun just to create a complete list. I thought of Welles and Cotten this morning when I woke up and was going to add it, but Nir beat me to it. Helen came up with some really good silent ones that had slipped my mind. I guess if you want my top 5 they would be: (Drum Roll Please)
1.) Fellini and Mastroainni
2.) Siegel and Eastwood
3.) Cassavetes and Rowland
4.) Rafelson and Nicholson
5.) Ramis and Murray
I’ve just thought of another one and these guys have made some excellent black comedies, possibly some of the best ever I might even place them in my top 5:
38.) Bertrand Blier and Gerard Depardieu
Nir and Miriam, and anyone else who’d care to jump in: do you have a top five? Or top three or whatever number.
I’m going to ponder mine while I wait on a reply. :=)
I don’t really have a top five because I never even thought of director/actor partnerhsips so thoroughly; I prefer to see, at least one single great partnership. But to add to the list:
Shinya Tsukamoto and… Shinya Tsukamoto! He was an actor and a director and he starred in a few of his own films, like Tetsuo: the Iron Man and Tokyo Fist. There’s Takashi Miike and Riki Takeuchi. Takeuchi played in 7 Miike films and always played the tough-as-nails cool guy, regardless of whether her played a good guy or a bad guy.
There are also Michelangelo Antonioni and Monica Vitti, Jean-Pierre Melville and Lino Ventura, Jean-Pierre Meville and Jean-Paul Belmondo, and finally there’s Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Dominique Pinon, who never stars in Jeunet’s films but plays in many of them as important characters. Hope it counts. :O)
On the same director/actor approach there are Buster Keaton, Charles Chaplin, Jacques Tati, and Orson Welles, again. :OD
Last but not least, one that we all somehow forgot: Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood.
So, Helen, what’s your top Five? It’s been four days since you’ve lasted posted here and the world is waiting on the edge of their seats for your answer.
Like Nir this is the first time I’ve dived into director/actor teams listmaking, but I have at last come up with a top five:
1 (tie) Kurosawa/Mifune and Ford/Wayne
3 Griffith/Gish
4 Woo/Chow
5 Carpenter/Russell
The world can take a deep breath. ;-)