Top 10 Actor-Director Pairings

These two were made for each other, and in a more conventional movie era they would have been typecast to much milder fare. Burton emerged from the Disney animation shop to make live-action cartoons about the angelic and the damaged. Depp never let his dreamboat looks hold him back from playing monsters and madmen. Together they created the sweet Frankenstein Edward Scissorhands and his tonsorial opposite, the soulful slicer Sweeney Todd -- Edward Razorhands.

Depp has embodied Burton's vision of the artist who won't let incompetence derail his ambition (Ed Wood) and the bumbling sleuth who finds the Headless Horsemen (Sleepy Hollow). In their latest collaboration, Burton's fantastically fun take on Alice in Wonderland, Depp is, of course, the Mad Hatter, declaiming The Jabberwocky in a thick Scottish burr. May they continue to perplex, amuse and astound us.

It's between Stewart and Cary Grant, two of the great naturals of Hollywood acting, as the prime Hitchcock hero. And while there's plenty to love in the suave, flawed, possibly predatory characters Grant played in his quartet of Hitchcock films (Suspicion, Notorious, To Catch a Thief and North by Northwest), the four Stewart made (Rope, Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much and Vertigo) get closer to the director's core strengths and obsessions. All cast Stewart as a man who must solve a crime even as he is drawn into it.

He falls in love with a dead woman in Vertigo and with the mechanics of murder in Rear Window. Stewart's task in both of these gems is essentially to watch -- to make palatable the voyeurism at the heart of filmgoing. He is a human movie camera, the transfixed eye of the audience, and Hitchcock's appealing, all-American surrogate.

The partnership of the Duke and Pappy spanned 33 years and 15 features, most of them westerns. Ford made Wayne a star in 1939 by casting him as the Ringo Kid in Stagecoach. Over the decades, under Ford's tutelage, Wayne grew in stature, star wattage and patriarchal surliness. Their essential collaborations: the late-'40s cavalry films Fort Apache and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and, in 1956, The Searchers, that towering, troubling essay on race, sex and Manifest Destiny. All these movies constitute a romantic first draft of American expansionist history, with Wayne as the crotchety Moses, urging his settlers toward a promised land he could never occupy.

The chemistry between actor and director -- the expression of one person's vision through another's physical force -- was primal in Kurosawa's work with Mifune, whose lithe, feral magnetism animated the great Japanese director's most vigorous parables. The pair's first major work together, the 1951 Rashomon, not only opened Japanese films to international audiences but also established Mifune as a great, sexy brute who cued modern machismo no less than Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire.

Kurosawa and Mifune went on to make corporate thrillers, H-bomb parables and adaptations of Gorky and Shakespeare, but their signature films were legendary action titles: The Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, The Hidden Fortress. These epics were adapted into better-known films in the West (The Magnificent Seven, A Fistful of Dollars, Star Wars), none of which matched the ferocious artistry of the originals.

Herzog once walked 800 miles to visit a dying friend in Paris; she lived another eight years. Kinski had gifts too, mainly of driving directors as mad as he was. These two willful loons and dedicated artists were destined to collaborate and collide. Their first work together, the 1973 Aguirre, the Wrath of God, took both men deep into the South American jungle to evoke the origins of colonial dementia. A great film, and so harrowing a mission they simply had to do it again, nine years later, with Fitzcarraldo. In rodentoid Max Schreck makeup, Kinski also starred in Herzog's remake of the 1922 Dracula film Nosferatu the Vampire. Like lovers whose mutual hatred is as monumental as their passion, the two had to break up after five films. Herzog later anatomized the doomed marriage in his wonderful documentary about Kinski: My Best Fiend.

Among the superlatives that might be tossed his way, Bergman was surely the most probing writer of women's roles, the most acute director of actresses. Harriet and Bibi Andersson, Ingrid Thulin and Gunnel Lindblom caught fire in the Swede's existential dramas. He wrote searing roles for them; they gave body and soul to his ideas, becoming for a time his muses, often his mistresses. Bergman's last, most lasting actress liaison was with the Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann. Her soft features and stern resolve inspired a string of stern masterworks, starting with 1966's Persona, in which she played a mute actress. Ullmann was no mere Trilby to Bergman's Svengali. She became his eloquent interpreter, later directing two of his screenplays. Saraband (2003), with Bergman again directing and Ullmann starring, climaxed nearly 40 years of an exemplary partnership.

In 1959, when he made The 400 Blows -- an instant astonishment that set the French New Wave churning -- François Truffaut, then 27, had no idea of following his teenage hero, played by Jean-Pierre Leaud, through two more decades of seriocomic escapades. But the end of that film, a freeze-frame of Antoine on a beach, left Truffaut and his audiences asking, What next? The callow charisma of young Leaud also begged to be used again.

What followed was a lovely short film (Antoine and Colette) and three features (Stolen Kisses, Bed and Board and Love on the Run) that fleshed out Antoine's early maturity -- or, rather, his prolonged, love-addled adolescence. Truffaut died early, at 52; Leaud's performances grew ever more eccentric, until he became the Crispin Glover of French cinema. If Truffaut had lived, we might be following Doinel into dotage. What we're left with is a delightful document of the bond between an endearingly quirky actor and the most likable great director in movie history.

Sternberg was a famous Hollywood auteur in 1930 and Dietrich a minor Berlin actress when he cast her as Lola, the crass chanteuse of The Blue Angel. Just like that, a star was born: an anti-Garbo who viewed life and love as a series of tragic amusements. In the rest of their seven films together -- Morocco, Dishonored, Shanghai Express, Blonde Venus, The Scarlet Empress and The Devil Is a Woman -- Sternberg swathed Dietrich's wry sexuality in silk, feathers, a gorilla suit and his camera's soft-focus devotion. As his films got more deliriously abstract, she got restless, and the two parted in 1935. Their legacy is these films: a uniquely frilly and profound record of an artist's obsession with his model.

For all the hundreds of movies angled to teens, adolescents rarely find films that shed a little light on their lives. Hughes, at his peak in the mid-'80s, showed them that light, with a rose-tinted glow. He was the rare writer (and sometimes director) whose pictures weren't about teenagers but inside them. The face of his Molly trilogy -- Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink -- was an actual teen, lovely enough to be a movie star but with all the ordinary yearnings of her age.

Together, they mined the emotional convulsions that make every kid feel he or she is the first lonely explorer on the dark side of the moon. The mating of a teen star and the creator of teen movies will naturally be short; Hughes and Ringwald made just those three films. But for a few years, they provided a gentle form of psychotherapy, with Hughes as the sympathetic shrink and Ringwald the secretary who makes sure the patient is smiling on the way out.