10 Directors Who Drove Their Movie Stars To The Edge

Toshiro Mifune had a longstanding collaboration with legendary director Akira Kurosawa that lasted 16 films, including Seven Samurai, Yojimbo and Rashomon. While Kurosawa is a globally renowned master of cinema, it is hard to imagine his biggest movies without the fine balance of driven physicality and delicate empathy that Mifune brought to them.

Unfortunately this decades-long partnership came to an unceremonious end on 1965’s Red Beard, after an irreparable rift developed between the two. There are many reasons for this, but the fact that Mifune had been required to grow and maintain a beard across two years of filming was a big one, because it meant he could not play any other roles during this time and ultimately landed the actor -- and the new production company he had set up -- in debt.

They never worked together again and, as if proving the essential alchemy of the pair's collaborations, Kurosawa (who had been so quick to spite his star for attempting to produce films in his own right) floundered, never recapturing the successes of his earlier career.