A post on another topic reminded me that I’ve seen Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan star opposite each other in 3 films: Joe vs. the Volcano, You’ve Got Mail, and Sleepless in Seattle. As far as I know, they don’t have anything to do with each other, unless there was some kind of volcano fetish theme running in the background of all 3 films.
What other famous actors have been cast in movies together where the plot is unrelated? I know Matt Damon and Ben Affleck are friends, so they’ve been in a few movies together. Probably ditto for married couples. Has there been multiple movies where 3 or more of the same famous actors had significant roles?
The Fortune Cookie
The Odd Couple (and its sequel)
Grumpy Old Men (and its sequel)
Buddy Buddy
The Front Page
The Grass Harp
JFK
Out to Sea
They’ve been in 10 movies together, although two of them are sequels to others on the list.
Just a wild guess, but Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder starred in a several movies together (I don’t know how many) that were stand-alone films, not part of a series or franchise.
Apparently they became friends to some degree, but Gene Wilder always kept at arm’s length from Richard Pryor because of the excessive drug abuse…
Lemmon also directed Kotch, which starred Matthau. He has a cameo in the film (unspeaking), so I’m not sure if it counts as a film they were both in. IIRC, they don’t interact in JFK, but they both have speaking parts.
Burt Reynolds and Dom DeLuise have to be in the running, or Adam Sandler/Steve Buscemi or Groucho Marx/Margaret Dumont. Of these, I guess only Sandler and Buscemi can both count as “major.”
I am not really a film nerd. I was wondering if, during the age of the all powerful studio (the 40’s and 50’s), since actors were less free to hop studio’s (contractually), that the same herd of actors and actresses end up in the same films more often than they do now.
These days, it seems that actors are much more free agents than they used to be.
Astaire and Rogers (9): Flying Down to Rio
The Gay Divorcee
Roberta
Top Hat
Follow the Fleet
Swing Time
Shall We Dance
The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle
The Barkleys of Broadway
Nelson Eddy & Jeanette Macdonald (8) Rose Marie (1936)
Naughty Marietta (1935)
New Moon (1940)
I Married an Angel (1942)
Girl of the Golden West (1938)
Bitter Sweet (1940)
Sweethearts (1938)
Maytime (1937)
The Marx Brothers (15, if you count The Story of Mankind)
Edna Purviance and Charlie Chaplin – over 30 films together.
They supposedly were romantically involved at the time, but Charlie did pick her out to be his leading lady before that. Since they made short subjects, it was easy to crank our 33 of them in the years they were together.
The Duke also appeared in at least a dozen films with Paul Fix.
Dick Powell appeared in several films with Pat O’Brien (as did Jimmy Cagney).
For some reason Humphrey Bogart appeared in several films with the then relative unknown newcomer Frank (Herbert T. Gillis) Faylen, best remembered as Ernie the cab driver in It’s a Wonderful Life. Bogart also appeared in at least a half-dozen films with Barton MacLane over a twelve years period.