Director-star Affairs

BY: Matt Elisofon

We don’t always think of directors as sex symbols, but when they’re on movie sets, their power is godlike, and that can be very, very attractive to actors (and vice versa, when it comes to actors’ vulnerability). Sometimes those attractions go further, either secretly… or not. Here are PROVOKR’s picks of some of the greatest director-star affairs in cinema history.

 

Kristen Stewart and director Rupert Sanders:
Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)

After Us Weekly published some damning photos of Stewart and Sanders in flagrante, her much-publicized Hollywood romance with Twilight co-star Robert Pattinson met a not-so-Hollywood ending. Or was it totally a Hollywood ending? It could go either way.

 

Cybill Shepherd and director Peter Bogdanovich:
The Last Picture Show (1971)

While launching his career as a director with the iconic The Last Picture Show, Bogdanovich fell for his 21-year-old star, Cybill Shepherd, and demolished his marriage to producer–production designer Polly Platt. When the pair were deemed box-office poison a few pictures later, they split. Bogdanovich made headlines a decade later for another affair with a young starlet named Dorothy Stratten, whom he’d cast in They All Laughed (1981). Soon after, Stratten was brutally murdered by her jealous husband; a heartbroken Bogdanovich later married her younger sister, Louise, who was 29 years his junior.

 

Aaron Johnson and director Sam Taylor-Wood:
Nowhere Boy (2009)

In a nice gender reversal of an all-too-common phenomenon, 42-year-old British director-cougar Sam Taylor-Wood snagged herself a star in 18-year-old Aaron Johnson on the set of Nowhere Boy, the story of John Lennon’s formative years and the rise of the Beatles. The two married and remain together to this day, sharing each other’s surnames (as Taylor-Johnson) and two daughters to boot!

 

Anna Karina and director Jean-Luc Godard:
Le Petit Soldat (1960)

Jean Seberg may have been the striped nymphet who declared “New York Herald Tribune!” in Godard’s breakthrough film, Breathless, but it was actually a young Anna Karina who took the director’s breath away. Karina and her mother—who had to sign release forms, since she was under 21—rejected a small part in the movie because of nudity, but eventually consented to a lead role in Le Petit Soldat, and Karina and Godard were married. Curiously, Le Petit Soldat wasn’t released till 1963, after Godard’s A Woman Is a Woman and Vivre Sa Vie had already made Karina an international sensation. By the late ’60s, they were fini.

 

Helena Bonham Carter and director Tim Burton:
Planet of the Apes (2001)

Falling for an actress who looked like a gorilla can be interpreted as either true love or true weirdness. But let’s be honest, when Tim Burton laid eyes on Helena Bonham Carter while rebooting Planet of the Apes, it was probably a little bit of both. After a dozen years—and half as many movies—of being Hollywood’s perfect odd couple, Burton and Carter called it quits in 2014.

 

Sharon Tate and director Roman Polanski:
The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967)

Polanski was a European cinema wunderkind when he cast the doe-eyed Tate in his farcical horror movie, The Fearless Vampire Killers; their on-set love affair and subsequent marriage was widely reported and celebrated. Her grisly murder two years later at the hands of the Manson family—she was 26 and eight months pregnant—sent Polanski into a tailspin. The success of Chinatown in 1974, the scandal of underage sex with a 13-year-old model and his fleeing justice followed. In France, Polanski shot Tess, an adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s classic novel of a maiden whose life is destroyed by seduction (read: rape), which starred an 18-year-old Nastassja Kinski. Rumors swirled about a romance between them, and though Kinksi, who met Polanski at 15, insisted it was nothing more than a flirtation, the director’s reputation didn’t help matters.

 

Frances McDormand and director Joel Coen:
Blood Simple (1984)

McDormand and Coen brother Joel met in the audition room of the noirish thriller Blood Simple, the first feature film of both, and married soon after. Over a half-dozen films (and a couple of Oscars), 30 years, and one child later, Coen and McDormand are going strong.

 

Ingrid Bergman and director Roberto Rossellini:
Stromboli (1950)

When Ingrid Bergman penned a letter to the exalted Italian neorealist director Roberto Rossellini expressing an interest in collaborating and he obliged, it’s safe to say neither knew what they were getting themselves into. News of their offscreen romance on the set of Stromboli—with Bergman married and a mother at the time—caused a furor during the moralistic McCarthy era. Bergman left the U.S. for a long exile and made several more films with Rossellini; they also had two children, including future actress Isabella.

 

Linda Hamilton and director James Cameron:
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

Before he became king of the world with Titanic, Cameron was best known for his Terminator series. During the Judgment Day juggernaught, he left his wife (and fellow director) Kathryn Bigelow for the actress who played Sarah Connor, Linda Hamilton. The two made it legal in 1997, but the RMS Titanic set sail months into their marriage and, according to Hamilton, was like “the mistress” he left her for.

 

Marlene Dietrich and director Josef von Sternberg:
The Blue Angel (1930)

While working in Berlin, the Hollywood director Josef von Sternberg plucked an unknown German actress out of obscurity and decided to give her a starring role (as the tawdry singer Lola Lola) in his newest film. Her name was Marlene Dietrich, and over the next five years they enjoyed a historic seven-film collaboration and a scandalous romance (both were married when they met) that took them to new heights of fame and cinema legend. When it ended, Sternberg, like the humiliated professor in The Blue Angel, lost his muse and his mojo.

 

Kate Capshaw and director Steven Spielberg:
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)

It seems only right that both Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw found in each other a second spouse on the set of a sequel. Seven years after meeting on Temple of Doom, the pair finally tied the knot. Like the Coen-McDormand coupling, Spielberg and Capshaw, at 25 years, have longevity on their side, but career-wise, Capshaw opted to play mom offscreen, many times over.

 

Melina Mercouri and director Jules Dassin:Never on Sunday (1960)

After being blacklisted in Hollywood for Communist ties, Dassin took to Europe nicely. And a few years into his exile a Grecian beauty on the set of Never On Sunday, Melina Mercouri, took to him as well. The two were married several years later and continued to collaborate until her death in 1994. Dassin never looked back.

 

Rose McGowan and director Robert Rodriguez:
Grindhouse / Planet Terror (2007)

When Robert Rodriguez got to work with Rose McGowan on the self-consciously cheesy Planet Terror in 2007 (part of the “double feature” Grindhouse, with Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof), some real-life horror went down. Their tryst broke up Rodriguez’s marriage and halted production for a whole month. Determined to double down on his decision, Rodriguez got engaged to McGowan and attached her as the lead of his upcoming projects. The movies didn’t get off the ground and their relationship went nowhere; they split in 2009.

 

Natalie Wood and director Nicholas Ray:
Rebel Without a Cause (1955)

Despite her beauty and talent, a teenage Natalie Wood left nothing to chance when vying for a major role in Ray’s iconic ’50s youth movie, Rebel Without a Cause, which turned James Dean into an overnight—and posthumous—star. Wood nailed her audition at Ray’s studio and in his Chateau Marmont bungalow for good measure.