Top 10 Actor-Director Pairings
Toshiro Mifune and Akira Kurosawa
The chemistry between actor and director — the expression of one person's vision through another's physical force — was primal in Kurosawa's work with Mifune, whose lithe, feral magnetism animated the great Japanese director's most vigorous parables. The pair's first major work together, the 1951 Rashomon, not only opened Japanese films to international audiences but also established Mifune as a great, sexy brute who cued modern machismo no less than Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire.
Kurosawa and Mifune went on to make corporate thrillers, H-bomb parables and adaptations of Gorky and Shakespeare, but their signature films were legendary action titles: The Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, The Hidden Fortress. These epics were adapted into better-known films in the West (The Magnificent Seven, A Fistful of Dollars, Star Wars), none of which matched the ferocious artistry of the originals.