Top 10 Actor-Director Pairings
Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg
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.