There are a number of them in Hollywood, both past and present. However, instead of naming them all (or at least a portion of them), i will vote for my worst combo and ask you all to do the same.
My choice: Judd Apatow/Leslie Mann.
Listen. I know they are married. But that is no reason to stick her in every movie he makes and making them almost unwatchable. The last movie I saw her in was “This is 40”. Paul Rudd is his normal, humorous self, but Leslie is a piece of chalk on a blackboard. Her voice is awful, her acting is awful, she is awful.
Apatow is killing me. He actually makes some pretty funny movies, but every time I see one of his movies and she pops up in it, I want to scream.
The only movie where her terrible delivery and persona works is “40 year-old Virgin”, and that’s because she is supposed to be a drunken mess in the movie. However, it turns out she is like that all the time! Please Judd! Make it stop!
There’s no chance that Clint Eastwood and Sondra Locke will ever make another movie together:
Here’s something that makes the case that Tim Burton should quit making movies with either Johnny Depp or Helena Bonham Carter:
Yeah, he’s your best friend. Yeah, she’s your long-time girlfriend with whom you’ve had two kids. That doesn’t mean you have to cast them in all your movies. You three are all good at what you do. You have just overdone working together.
Sondra Locke was actually a good actress at one time. She was nominated for an Oscar. It’s only the films she did during her time living with Eastwood that were so bad. It was Eastwood who screwed up her career, and it’s never recovered. She went along with him as he made a long series of good-old-boy-comedy-adventures. When they broke up, he went on to make much better films, both as actor and as director. She couldn’t get any further roles. Read the Wikipedia entry on her that I’ve given the link for. Eastwood was a jerk who destroyed her career for the fun of it.
Peter Bogdanovich and Cybill Shepherd won’t make any more films together either. The interesting thing was that Bogdanovich’s wife at the time of The Last Picture Show, Polly Platt, was really sort of the co-director and co-writer of that film, despite what the credits say. It’s the best thing that Bogdanovich ever did, and by breaking up his marriage to Platt, he made sure that he would never do anything as good again.
I also find it interesting that since they broke up in the mid 70s, even Cybill Shepherd has actually had a comparatively stronger career than Bogdanovich.
Although I have no trouble believing Eastwood is a complete tool and ruined Locke’s career, I do have trouble believing she was ever a good actress. Being nominated for an Oscar doesn’t mean much to me. Hell, Nick Cage WON an Oscar by basically playing himself, the same character he plays in every movie. The only difference was thatin Leaving Las Vegas, his half-open eyed, slack-jawed delivery worked perfectly for the movie.
I would have to see Locke acting other than her standard stiff self, and that would mean I would purposely watch one of her movies. I can’t see that happening. Unless I saw it by accident, or lost a bet, I would never watch it. I am mildly intrigued to see her without Eastwood, because that might be a revelation, but I just can’t do it.
I am also going to add:
Woody Allen and Diane Keaton? What are you talking about? The OP for this thread asked for cases where an actor and a director don’t work together well, not just for any case whether an actress and a director were married or lived together and made several movies together. Allen and Keaton worked together very well. Incidentally, all of their movies together were made after they broke up. Keaton did very well in Allen’s films, and she won an Oscar for one of them. Allen and Keaton helped establish each other’s careers, and there’s nothing to complain about their work together.
Why are you always blaming the actress for the movie? Mann is “a piece of chalk on a blackboard”? Locke is “one of the worst actresses of her era”? I can’t trust your judgment on anything now. You feel it necessary to exaggerate everything. I thought that people would be coming up with cases where a (male) actor and a (male) director don’t work together well, despite being good when they weren’t working together. It appears that all you want to do is find examples of director/actress pairs who worked together and were married or living together and then blame the actress for all the problems with the movies, even when there weren’t problems with the movies.
Separately, Taurog won an Oscar as best director for “Skippy” (1931) and got a nomination for “Boy’s Town” (1938). Elvis was never an-Oscar caliber actor, but in his pre-Army films he at least showed some promise, notably in “Jailhouse Rock” and “King Creole.”
Together they made nine films. They started off with the mediocre but bearable “G.I. Blues” (1960) and “Blue Hawaii” (1961), then settled down into the truly wretched: “Girls! Girls! Girls!” (1962), “It Happened at the World’s Fair” (1963), “Tickle Me” (1965), “Spinout” (1966), “Double Trouble” (1967), “Speedway” (1968) and “Live a Little, Love a Little” (1968).