Dream teams

Matching the right actor with the right director may seem easy, but it takes a degree of alchemy. The results can be magic on the screen.



Hollywood accounting isn't terribly trustworthy, but when it comes to great actor-director pairings, the usually unreliable show business math can actually make sense: One plus one often totals a lot more than two.

Consider some of these combinations: Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro. Woody Allen and Diane Keaton. Clint Eastwood and ... Clint Eastwood.

Combining the right director with the right actor may seem obvious — who else other than Peter O'Toole could play the aging British actor in Roger Michell's "Venus"? — but it's not always that simple. Eddie Murphy wasn't initially inclined to star in Bill Condon's "Dreamgirls" and at first Paramount didn't want Jennifer Hudson; Greg Kinnear was on the fence for Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton's "Little Miss Sunshine"; and Leonardo DiCaprio — not Matt Damon — was penciled in as the lead of De Niro's "The Good Shepherd."

But when the stars — and the filmmakers — ultimately do align, the results can be spectacular. Here's a look at some of the year's most fruitful actor-director partnerships:

-- John Horn