Screen partners

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Relations between directors and producers with their actors can be a difficult one, that combustible clash of egos and ideals.

But some blossom into cinlok (love on location) partnerships that end up lasting longer than the shooting schedule.

Hot on the heels and cheatin’ hearts of Kristen and Rupert, here are a few other famous director-actor couples that enjoyed varying degrees of relationship staying power.

The Selznicks: David O. Selznick was the hot-shot producer who launched the search for the actress to play Scarlett O’ Hara in 1939’s Gone With the Wind. Although he eventually picked the English actress Vivien Leigh, his second wife, the dark-haired, pale-skinned Jennifer Jones, also would have been an excellent choice. Selznick left his wife, Irene, the daughter of movie mogul Louis B. Mayer, and Jones divorced actor Robert Walker to wed; despite (or perhaps because of) Selznick being 17 years older, their marriage lasted until his death in 1965. Jones, who won an Oscar for the 1943 movie Song of Bernadette, later married tycoon Norton Simon, who had lost a son to suicide. In a tragic coincidence, Jones’ only daughter with Selznick was also to end her life several years later by jumping from a high-rise at the age of 22.

The Fellinis: Italy’s renowned screen couple of the 1950s and early 1960s. Federico Fellini directed his own brand of baroque and improvisational works for his wife, Giuletta Masina, to star in (La Strada is among the most famous). Partners to the very end, they died within six months of each other in 1993-94.

Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini: The Swedish native went to Hollywood and, like her predecessor Greta Garbo, became a successful star (Gaslight, Notorious). Unlike Garbo, she did not want to be alone; in a much more prim and proper era in the US, she left her husband and young daughter for the Italian director Roberto Rossellini (one of their children is the model-actress Isabella Rossellini). Although the marriage ended in divorce, it took time for Bergman to rebuild her career in Tinseltown. However, despite boycotts of her movies by religious groups, she won an Oscar for Anastasia in 1956.

Luchino Visconti and Helmut Berger: Italian director Luchino Visconti made ornate and gorgeous movies (The Leopard, Death in Venice). A son of the aristocracy, he became besotted by Austrian Helmut Berger, a handsome blond 38 years his junior then who had left his family hotel business to study acting in Rome. Visconti crafted several movies for his beloved; Berger doing a turn as Marlene Dietrich in drag in The Damned is notorious, but his most acclaimed role was as the repressed homosexual monarch in Ludwig. After Visconti’s death in 1976, the aging Berger has found work harder to get, although in recent years he has become a frequent German TV talk show guest, often in a very jolly state of mind.

James Cameron and Linda Hamilton: The pair teamed up for The Terminator in 1984 but it is said they did not become an item until 1990 with the movie’s sequel. They married for two years in the late 1990s, and had one daughter. Their divorce led to a US$50 million settlement for Hamilton (small change for Mr. Cameron after the success of Titanic).