There have been plenty of iconic director + actor duos over the years, with some of the most celebrated in cinema history including Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro (and/or Leonardo DiCaprio), Quentin Tarantino and Samuel L. Jackson, and Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. These ones might be noteworthy and high profile, but they don’t necessarily rank among the most prolific or longest-running, at least when you judge such partnerships by the number of films made together.
The following director + actor duos are at least fairly well-known and publicized, but are also ranked below by how many titles each respective duo has worked on together. Some of these partnerships are more defined by small roles and/or frequent cameos, while others showcase a director continually getting one actor to play the lead role again and again. In any event, these partnerships are long-running, prolific, and worth celebrating/highlighting.
10 Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell
13 collaborations
Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell burst onto the filmmaking scene together, thanks to the former directing the latter in the iconic and bloody 1981 horror film The Evil Dead. Campbell’s character ended up being the sole survivor of that film, and returned in two sequels – Evil Dead II (1987) and Army of Darkness (1992) – that gradually (and hilariously) made him more of an action hero than a rather reserved would-be victim.
Outside of starring in these three movies, Campbell tends to have cameo roles in various other movies directed by Raimi, including having scene-stealing appearances across Raimi’s three Spider-Man movies and featuring in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. He was a reliable leading man for a trilogy, and elsewhere seems to be something of a good luck charm for Raimi. Either way, Campbell’s always a welcome presence in any Sam Raimi-directed film.
9 Blake Edwards and Julie Andrews
14 collaborations
Blake Edwards was a filmmaker who began directing in the 1950s, with some of his most notable movies – including Breakfast at Tiffany’s and two entries in The Pink Panther series – coming out in the 1960s. In 1969, he married Julie Andrews, who’d already risen to fame thanks to classic musicals like The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins, with this husband/wife duo collaborating in 14 films over the following years.
1979’s 10 was a notable film the pair made together, owing to its box office success, but the greatest movie directed by Edwards and starring Andrews was the underrated – and daring for its time – 1982 musical Victor/Victoria. They found success as a director/actor duo and, it can be said, as a couple, given the two remained married for 41 years, ending in 2010 when Edwards passed away at the age of 88.
8 Ron Howard and Clint Howard
17 collaborations
The Howards are one of those noteworthy and generation-spanning showbiz families, with Ron Howard – who rose to fame as an actor when he was a child and young adult before becoming a director – being perhaps the most well-known of the bunch. Both his parents were actors, and his daughter, Bryce Dallas Howard, has become fairly well-known too, though the Howard who’s shown up most often in Ron’s movies has been his younger brother, Clint Howard.
These are usually smaller roles, though he’s featured fairly prominently in 1995’s Apollo 13 and the sometimes beloved – yet sometimes derided – How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000). Cynics may say this brotherly partnership could just be an extension of an older brother getting to boss his younger brother around professionally, but it could just be that Ron Howard likes collaborating with family members and having them in minor or supporting roles, and has done so the most with his brother.
7 Gary Marshall and Héctor Elizondo
18 collaborations
Gary Marshall was a filmmaker best known for making comedies, including the Julia Roberts/Richard Gere film Pretty Woman and both the first Princess Diaries film and its sequel. All throughout his filmography, one actor shows up in every single feature film he made: Héctor Elizondo. This was a well-established pattern as early as 1994’s Exit to Eden, given that one famously features the words “as usual, Héctor Elizondo” in the credits.
For that track record – 18 movies by Marshall and all of them featuring Elizondo in some capacity – this duo is well worth mentioning, and the only thing that stopped it being more long-running, it seems, was Marshall’s passing at the age of 81 in 2016. Also, in fairness to Héctor Elizondo, his acting career has extended beyond just appearing in films directed by Gary Marshall, as he’s also quite well-known for starring in shows like Chicago Hope and non-Marshall movies like American Gigolo and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.
6 Joe Dante and Dick Miller
18 collaborations
If you watch a Roger Corman-directed movie from the 1950s or early 1960s, there’s a very good chance Dick Miller will show up at some point. He also appeared in numerous films directed by Jonathan Kaplan (who was associated with Corman), yet his most noteworthy collaborator was perhaps Joe Dante, with the two teaming up numerous times at a later point in Miller’s career.
Dante was also mentored by Corman, so it’s not too surprising to see a reliable and always entertaining character actor like Dick Miller show up repeatedly. Perhaps the most well-known of the various movies Dante and Miller made together would be the 1984 comedy/horror/Christmas classic Gremlins, where the latter showed up in a supporting role as Murray Futterman (a role he reprised in the 1990 sequel Gremlins 2: The New Batch).
5 Ingmar Bergman and Gunnar Björnstrand
19 collaborations
Ingmar Bergman was a Swedish filmmaker behind some of the heaviest and most gripping drama films of all time, and continually showed himself to be someone who could get great performances out of those he directed. He also wasn’t shy about reusing various favored actors of his again and again, eventually establishing a group of them he used over the decades, including well-regarded performers like Max von Sydow, Harriet Andersson, Erland Josephson, and Liv Ullmann.
The most frequent Bergman collaborator might be surprising, though, as he’s not quite as well-recognized as some of those aforementioned actors. The actor who ended up being in 19 Bergman films was Gunnar Björnstrand, perhaps as a result of being affiliated with Bergman right at the start of the latter’s directing career, when he was at his most prolific. Björnstrand’s most significant role among these films was probably in 1962’s Winter Light, a bleak and understated character drama about a pastor grappling with a spiritual/existential crisis.
4 Akira Kurosawa and Takashi Shimura
21 collaborations
Perhaps like with Ingmar Bergman, the most well-known collaborator of Akira Kurosawa’s was not his most prolific. The arguable top contender for that title is Toshiro Mifune, a superstar actor who worked with Kurosawa 16 times between 1948 and 1965, with the two parting ways after the release of 1965’s Red Beard. Takashi Shimura ended up having five more collaborations with Kurosawa than Mifune, though he’s perhaps less well-known because some of these were smaller roles.
Still, Takashi Shimura has to be appreciated as a vital collaborator of Kurosawa’s, especially when taking into consideration his amazing work in the lead role of the emotionally devastating Ikiru, and for playing the leader of the samurai warriors in the classic action epic Seven Samurai. Outside his work with Kurosawa, Shimura still managed to be tremendously prolific within the Japanese film industry, perhaps most notably having a key supporting role in the very first Godzilla film.
3 John Ford and John Wayne
21 collaborations
John Ford made many movies throughout his long filmmaking career, and so it stands to reason that he had his fair share of frequent collaborators, including the likes of Maureen O’Hara, Henry Fonda, John Carradine, and Harry Carey. But it’s hard sometimes to look past the actor Ford was most often associated with: famously masculine Western star John Wayne, who admittedly didn’t just star in Westerns, but he was, without a doubt, in a great many of them.
Wayne’s earliest films with Ford go back as far as the late 1920s, but it was 1939’s Stagecoach – directed by Ford – that made Wayne a superstar. From there, the two Johns often seemed to go hand in hand, and it’s fair to say that many of Ford’s greatest films starred Wayne, and many of Wayne’s greatest films were directed by Ford. They both undeniably made their mark on American cinema and particularly the Western genre, especially considering the legacy that movies like The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance have.
2 Yasujirō Ozu and Chishū Ryū
52 collaborations
When it comes to discussing all-time great Japanese directors, Yasujirō Ozu is a name that will often be brought up alongside the likes of other heavy-hitters like Akira Kurosawa and Hayao Miyazaki. Ozu was arguably at his peak throughout the 1950s, directing classics of Japanese cinema like Early Summer, Tokyo Story, and Good Morning. The similarly legendary Japanese actor Chishū Ryū was there for almost every single film Ozu directed, appearing in 52 out of 54 total movies.
Yasujirō Ozu was incredibly prolific, regrettably living only to the age of 60 yet still directing enough films to have almost one for every year he was alive. Chishū Ryū was born just one year after Ozu, but ended up living to the age of 88, remaining active until 1992 and passing away in 1993. He racked up over 200 credits in this time, and even found another Japanese director whom he collaborated with almost as much as he’d done with Ozu: Yoji Yamada. Speaking of…
1 Yoji Yamada and Chieko Baisho
57 collaborations
Yoji Yamada had numerous actors he worked with dozens of times, owing to the fact he directed 48 of 50 films in one of the longest-running series in cinema history: Otoko wa Tsurai yo, sometimes known as the Tora-san series, named after its main character. Kiyoshi Atsumi portrayed Tora-san in almost every single film, with other cast members appearing in all entries or close to all entries, including the aforementioned Chishū Ryū as a local Buddhist priest in 40+ films, and Chieko Baisho in every single movie in the series as the title character’s half-sister, Sakura.
Yamada’s so prolific as a filmmaker that he’s made almost as many non-Tora-san movies as he has Tora-san films, and Baisho has had roles in numerous films of Yamada’s that don’t revolve around Tora-san, too. She’s worth highlighting above the other Yamada collaborators for the fact she’s arguably the heart and soul of the Tora-san films, with the main character often being there as a source of conflict or humor (his inability to find love and stop being a bachelor is the main premise of the series, after all). Baisho is now 82 and Yamada is 92, yet impressively, both are still active within the Japanese film industry, with the former having the lead role in 2022’s sci-fi/drama film Plan 75 and the latter directing a 2023 release (his 90th film) with a title that translates to Mom, Is That You?! in English.
