There is a dazzling variety of life-long partnerships between film directors and their favorite actors. In the case of those listed below, it would seem that almost any one name could be dropped and replaced with another. John Mills, for example, was in more of David Lean’s films than Alec Guinness, but I believe that, in the masterpieces that Lean and Guinness made together, each artist was essential for the other to do his best work, and the films they made would have suffered without the presence of both. Likewise, Max von Sydow was famously Ingmar Bergman’s male lead of choice, but I would argue that Bergman’s collaborations with Liv Ullmann reveal the deeper talents of both director and performer in ways that neither could match alone. And, again, one might insist that Federico Fellini’s greatest collaboration was not with Marcello Mastroianni, but with his wife, Giulietta Massina, but Marcello – he is more than just an actor, no?
I invite you to submit your own choices – or to shoot down mine – in the Comments section.
With that in mind …
The 20 Greatest Director/Actor Collaborations
- Woody Allen / Diane Keaton
- Ingmar Bergman / Liv Ullman
- The Coen Bros. / John Goodman
- George Cukor / Katharine Hepburn
- Federico Fellini / Marcello Mastroianni
- John Ford / John Wayne
- Jean-Luc Godard / Anna Karina
- D.W. Griffith / Lillian Gish
- Akira Kurosawa / Toshiro Mifune
- Werner Herzog / Klaus Kinski
- Alfred Hitchcock / James Stewart
- John Huston / Humphrey Bogart
- David Lean / Alec Guinness
- Mike Leigh / Timothy Spall
- Bruce Robinson / Richard E. Grant
- Martin Scorsese / Robert De Niro
- Don Siegel / Clint Eastwood
- François Truffaut / Jean-Pierre Léaud
- Wong Kar Wai / Tony Leung Chiu Wai
- Zhang Yimou / Gong Li
