John Wayne had it with John Ford. Marcello Mastroianni had it with Federico Fellini. Even Molly Ringwald had it with John Hughes. It’s a continuing collaboration between star and director that enlarges and somehow illuminates both talents.

An equally celebrated pairing was Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese, but it might not be Scorsese’s only productive partnership with an actor. The Departed is his third film starring Leonardo DiCaprio, and the two reportedly plan to do a fourth film together, about Theodore Roosevelt.

Russell Crowe and Ridley Scott also seem to be establishing a working rapport: reunited after Gladiator for the vineyard yarn A Good Year, they have gone straight into making the Seventies-set American Gangster.

Such a collaboration may not last — witness Woody Allen and his leading ladies. It may not be entirely amicable — Ford and Wayne had a feisty father-son relationship that could explode at any time. It may not be infallible — George Cukor and Katharine Hepburn let each other down on more than one occasion. Yet out of such pairings emerges something special.

Although Toshiro Mifune made some fine films with other directors, it’s his films with Akira Kurosawa that remain most memorable. The same is true of Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman.

When the relationship of a director and his or her screen persona is symbiotic, it’s not easy to tell where one leaves off and the other begins. In Werner Herzog’s films with Klaus Kinski, the obsessive film-maker’s camera dwells in hypnotic fascination and awe on Kinski’s wild-eyed descents into lunacy.

Soon after François Truffaut died, a friend said to Jean-Pierre Léaud, Truffaut’s screen alter ego for 20 years: “You must be really terrified. Now you have no one protecting you.” Léaud could only nod in glum agreement.

In cinema’s adolescence, such regular collaborations were the norm as directors used the same leading and supporting players. This trend faded as the films and stars got bigger, with only such directors as Robert Altman, Mel Brooks, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Woody Allen keeping the repertory ethos alive in the Seventies and Eighties.

Today, the leading auteur still overseeing an informal rep company is Pedro Almodóvar. His latest film Volver not only features Carmen Maura, the director’s Eighties muse, but also Penélope Cruz, who has slowly moved to the forefront of his movies. Almodóvar has turned Cruz into a screen goddess in the old high style, just as Josef von Sternberg bathed Marlene Dietrich in a soft-focus, star-making devotion. What a difference a sympathetic director can make.

Today, spiralling budgets, the vagaries of screenplay collaborations, the salaries demanded by stars and the time it takes to mobilise forces for a major motion picture tend to hamper regular collaborations in Hollywood. The director and star must really want to work together to make it happen.

Like many actor/muses, Johnny Depp has developed an abiding trust of his favourite director, Tim Burton. “If Tim wanted to shoot 18 million feet of film of me staring into a light bulb and I couldn’t blink for three months, I’d do it,” Depp has said.

“A lot of things now are unspoken, which gets a lot of mileage out of the way,” Ridley Scott said of Russell Crowe at the Toronto Film Festival launch for A Good Year. “When you’re working with an actor for the first time, you’ve got to dance a bit and waltz a bit. We don’t have to do that now.”

For DiCaprio, trusting Scorsese “makes the job easier”.

So could Scorsese’s current attachment to the actor, with whom he has also made Gangs of New York and The Aviator, blossom into a fruitful partnership to match that with De Niro? To those raised on Scorsese’s gritty work of the Seventies and early Eighties, that might seem fanciful: De Niro is from the same Italian-American mean streets as Scorsese; DiCaprio, a former child actor, is from the Hollywood back lot.

Yet De Niro ascended as a leading man in the Seventies, when his Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver could become a star. Today, such movies tend to exist only in indie films while Hollywood relies on franchises. For Scorsese to continue to make his films on a relatively large scale, he needs the kind of star clout that DiCaprio enjoys.

While Gangs of New York, an epic tale of 19th-century gang rivalry, was a box-office and critical disappointment, both earned praise for the Howard Hughes biopic The Aviator, with DiCaprio’s performance growing from careless young charmer to the older, physically damaged tycoon.

Scorsese might be the man to help DiCaprio shake off his cherubic man-child demeanour. At 31, the actor is barely older than De Niro was when he made Mean Streets (1973). The De Niro of that film, though electrifying, was not as masterful as he would be in Raging Bull (1980).

One can almost regard The Departed, in which DiCaprio plays a cop infiltrating the Mob, as his full baptism in the Scorsese canon of gangster grit and gore. The film is also the most commercially viable of Scorsese’s films, with DiCaprio appearing in a high-wattage cast that also includes Jack Nicholson, Matt Damon and Mark Wahlberg. So this might be the film that makes Hollywood see Scorsese and DiCaprio as a bank- able partnership. And who knows where that might lead.

Don’t miss an exclusive interview with Leonardo DiCaprio in The Knowledge in The Times on Saturday

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