Frequent collaborations between actors and directors are what the movies are made of. Artistic endeavors are never easy, especially the ones you can’t do all by yourself, so when you find someone who shares your interests and works well alongside your needs and opinions, you tend to stick together. Hollywood and world cinema are full of such partnerships — Alfred Hitchcock famously worked multiple times with Hollywood legends Cary Grant, James Stewart, Ingrid Bergman, and Grace Kelly.

Sure, some directors and actors work together a couple of times, and that’s great. It’s even fun when a great director and a great actor who worked together once in the past re-team after many years apart. But the real secret sauce is in whatever exists between those directors and actors who have worked together since the beginning of their careers, who keep popping up in each other’s projects, who simply can’t seem to stop working together. It’s these collaborative relationships that are the most exciting, whether they be familial, romantic, or just plain good friends.

For the fans, that means an extra little Easter egg to watch out for whenever they go to see their favorite director’s latest film. Some of these partnerships started strong and then petered out. Some of them lasted multiple consecutive years. Some of them kept going until one of the members either retired or died. Some of them are still going on to this day. These are the directors, of cinema history past and present, who kept casting that same darn actor in the majority of or almost every single one of their films.

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