Top 10 Actor-Director Pairings

John Wayne and John Ford

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.

• Ciao, Fellini! (Or We Love Fellini!)