SCFZ

I doubt it! One of the all-time greats!

Umbugbene wrote: ↑Mon May 18, 2020 11:53 pm A friend of mine suggested that Piccoli worked with more great directors than any actor in history:

Can any actor or actress match this?

it might be true, though i think there are going to be several other actors with similar lists. the first person i thought to look at was isabelle huppert, who worked with all of the following at least once:

neil jordan, benoit jacquot, michael haneke, hong sang-soo, paul verhoeven, mia hansen-love, joachim trier, catherine breillat, valeria sarmiento, marco bellocchio, brillante mendoza, claire denis, rithy panh, claude chabrol, patrice chereau, david o russell, werner schroeter, francois ozon, raoul ruiz, olivier assayas, taviani brothers, abbas kiarostami, hal hartley, jacques doillon, aleksander petrovic, andrzej wajda, curtis hanson, bertrand blier, marco ferreri, joseph losey, jean-luc godard, michel deville, bertrand tavernier, mauro bolognini, michael cimino, maurice pialat, marta meszaros, andre techine, claude goretta, otto preminger, alain robbe-grillet, claude sautet

seems like it could make for an interesting film game -- list the directors an actor has worked with, and from there try to guess the actor (or maybe in reverse too, list the actors a director has worked with and guess the director).

I'd say it depends a lot on how you weight the importance of the directors. I lean towards Piccoli probably having the most immediately impressive slate of directors for managing to snag some really famous directors like Hitchcock, Bunuel, and Renoir in addition to a diverse range of other quality directors that at least some find of considerable importance. It's the mix of the big names with a lot of more unusual directors like Chahine and Iosellani that give him a slight edge along with his long career that had his career overlap with so many important directors, something younger actors won't be able to do since the nature of filmmaking has changed and history has been written that can't have equal in some ways.

Still, I'm more or less as impressed by Juliette Binoche's body of work. She's worked with some of the same or similar level major French and other European directors but also has worked with Hou Hsiao-hsien, Kiarostami, Hirokazu Kore-eda, and Naomi Kawase as well as seeming to go out of her way to work with women directors who aren't necessarily famous, but then movie history hasn't really played fair about fame of women directors either. She's also done this in far fewer movies as her career is at its peak, so still more room to grow.

Jeanne Moreau has a nice group, Fernando Rey has a fun one some major directors and some really trashy ones, Akim Tamiroff has a surprisingly strong international list too. It's easy enough for some actors to work with lots of big name directors in the same country/language or a good selection within western Europe given how they finance films, the thing that really sells a list for me is if the list covers a wider range of cinema by locale, style and era, and Piccoli is hard to beat in that accounting, though there are others close.

That is an impressive list for Huppert. I'd still give Piccoli the edge, partly because he goes back to a more fertile period for cinema - through the mid-century and all the way back to the Occupation in 1945. But Jeanne Moreau is real competition for Piccoli:

Marc Allégret, Theo Angelopoulos, Jean-Jacques Annaud, Michelangelo Antonioni, Anthony Asquith, Jacques Becker, Luc Besson, Bertrand Blier, Peter Brook, Luis Buñuel, Philippe de Broca, Manoel de Oliveira, Henri Decoin, Jacques Demy, Michel Deville, Marguerite Duras, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, John Frankenheimer, Amos Gitai, Jean-Luc Godard, Elia Kazan, Joseph Losey, Louis Malle, Marcel Ophüls, François Ozon, Jean Renoir, Tony Richardson, François Truffaut, Tsai Ming-Liang, Roger Vadim, Agnès Varda, Orson Welles, Wim Wenders

it's actually really hard to think of any equivalent english language actors; even someone like john hurt whose career goes back to the 60s and has worked far more internationally than most english or american actors doesn't even come close.

i found an english language acting candidate -- someone who worked with alfred hitchcock, john ford, jean renoir, fritz lang, roberto rossellini and others. i'll leave the person's name out in case someone wants to guess, here's a partial list of their directors:

tay garnett, john ford, norman foster, john farrow, anatole litvak, james whale, alfred hitchcock, ws van dyke, henry hathaway, george cukor, john cromwell, jean renoir, henry king, robert siodmak, edgar ulmer, douglas sirk, otto preminger, cecil b demille, julien duvivier, joseph mankiewicz, richard brooks, michael gordon, robert parrish, roberto rossellini, john sturges, fritz lang, ronald neame, frank tashlin, sidney lumet, king vidor, john brahm, jean delannoy, robert stevenson, george marshall, blake edwards, michael anderson, william friedkin, jess franco, john huston, sidney gilliat

George Sanders! Yes, excellent candidate. If this goes any further though it deserves its own thread. I'm half-afraid someone will read my answer and think Sanders died just recently!

i couldn't resist trying to find another of similar quality - no luck, but I found a decent one

Robert Siodmak, André de Toth, Fred Zinnemann, Nicholas Ray, Delmer Daves, Robert Aldrich, John Sturges, Frank Lloyd, Richard Brooks, Michael Curtiz, Richard Fleischer, Vittorio De Sica, Mario Camerini, Gordon Douglas, Sam Peckinpah, Lewis Gilbert, Arthur Lubin, Ronald Neame, Ivan Passer, Earl Bellamy, Franco Zeffirelli, Monte Hellman, Delbert Mann, Sergio Corbucci, John Carpenter, Wes Craven, Andrew V. McLaglen, Joe Dante, David Zucker, Sean Penn, John Landis

is that ernest borgnine?

i found one more, last one i'll post, possibly hard to guess though:

michael curtiz, cecil b demille, henry hathaway, james whale, edgar ulmer, lewis milestone, john ford, george marshall, frank lloyd, henry king, victor fleming, otto preminger, norman foster, clarence brown, allan dwan, john farrow, fritz lang, rouben mamoulian, jean renoir, john cromwell, jules dassin, edward dmytryk, douglas sirk, edgar ulmer, roy del ruth, william cameron menzies, robert mulligan, nicholas ray, jacques tourneur, john frankenheimer, ralph nelson, michael anderson, john brahm, arthur hiller, ishiro honda, robert altman, irvin kershner, jerry lewis, bob clark, russ meyer, martin scorsese, woody allen, michael winner, don siegel, elia kazan, j lee thompson, joe dante, don bluth, francis ford coppola

John Carradine?

indeed!

Ishiro Honda though? The only American actors I can think of he's worked with are Joseph Cotten, Cesar Romero, Russ Tamblyn, and of course Nick Adams, the first three of which make for some fun credits in this same vein.

Oh, and Richard Jaeckel too. I forgot about him and his credits are kinda amusing too, though in a lesser way.

greg x wrote: ↑Wed May 20, 2020 12:49 pm Ishiro Honda though?

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050480/

Ah, that was evidently new footage added by a US distributor for stateside release, kinda like Raymond Burr's bits in Godzilla I guess.


Back on Mubi when a similar topic came up, one of my early ideas for best credits was this actor's:

WIlder, Hawks, Ford, Wyler, Renoir, Von Sternberg, Curtiz, Duvivier, Borowczyk, Bresson, Wellman, Fleischer, Minnelli, Cukor, LeRoy, Gance, Nichols, H.King, Houston, Fuller, Ritt, Guitry, Clement, Decoin, Cukor, C.Vidor, de Broca, Sautet, Oury, Brahm, Siodmak, Bernard, Pabst, Bernard-Roland, M&Y Allegret(s), Genina, Thorpe, Ustinov, Edwards, Taurog, Verneuil, Negulesco, Chenal, Bernhardt, Goulding, Lautner, Florey, and some other less recognizable names.

Nice top heavy group with a few "rare" credits to score mixed in.

i can't figure out who that is!

Gotta be Marcel Dalio?

Yep. Dalio it is and as an added little credit, he also is one of the lucky few to be subject of a Rappaport film bio.

Irm Hermann

Oh no, I loved her!

Yeah, and she was definitely the hottest out of all the Fassbinder actresses.

https://scroll.in/reel/963788/with-basu ... hroniclers

very old of course but feels like the end of an era...

luther price

https://lightcone.org/en/filmmaker-249-luther-price

Ian Holm, 88.

A great actor.

The headlines about Ian Holm are all about ALIEN and LOTR and CHARIOTS and all -- I'm recommending THE SWEET HEREAFTER for rediscovery. He'll be missed.

glad to see a lot of people (at least people i know) repping the eternally underseen esther kahn

Carl Reiner

Aww, RIP. He was excellent as Saul in Soderbergh's Ocean's franchise, which I just watched recently.

Maybe his son Rob should be one of our director polls after all, heh.

Ennio Morricone