Top 20 Director/Actor Collaborations

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

1. Woody Allen / Diane Keaton
2. Ingmar Bergman / Liv Ullman
3. The Coen Bros. / John Goodman
4. George Cukor / Katharine Hepburn
5. Federico Fellini / Marcello Mastroianni
6. John Ford / John Wayne
7. Jean-Luc Godard / Anna Karina
8. D.W. Griffith / Lillian Gish
9. Akira Kurosawa / Toshiro Mifune
10. Werner Herzog / Klaus Kinski
11. Alfred Hitchcock / James Stewart
12. John Huston / Humphrey Bogart
13. David Lean / Alec Guinness
14. Mike Leigh / Timothy Spall
15. Bruce Robinson / Richard E. Grant
16. Martin Scorsese / Robert De Niro
17. Don Siegel / Clint Eastwood
18. François Truffaut / Jean-Pierre Léaud
19. Wong Kar Wai / Tony Leung Chiu Wai
    
20. Zhang Yimou / Gong Li