PERFECT TOGETHER

HOLLYWOOD accounting isn’t terribly trustworthy, but when it comes to great actor-director pairings, the usually unreliable show business math can actually make sense: One plus one often totals a lot more than two.

Consider some of these combinations: Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro. Woody Allen and Diane Keaton. Clint Eastwood and ... Clint Eastwood.

Combining the right director with the right actor may seem obvious -- who else other than Peter O’Toole could play the aging British actor in Roger Michell’s “Venus”? -- but it’s not always that simple. Eddie Murphy wasn’t initially inclined to star in Bill Condon’s “Dreamgirls” and at first Paramount didn’t want Jennifer Hudson; Greg Kinnear was on the fence for Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton’s “Little Miss Sunshine”; and Leonardo DiCaprio -- not Matt Damon -- was penciled in as the lead of De Niro’s “The Good Shepherd.”

But when the stars -- and the filmmakers -- ultimately do align, the results can be spectacular. Here’s a look at some of the year’s most fruitful actor-director partnerships:

John Horn

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HELEN MIRREN AND STEPHEN FREARS: A CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT

AT one recent awards show in which “The Queen” was honored, the evening’s organizers projected some footage of Queen Elizabeth II. “I was looking at it, and wondering, ‘Why did I put that shadow in there? That doesn’t look very good,’ ” director Frears says. Then he realized it wasn’t Mirren whom he was watching. It was Her Majesty herself.

That Frears himself was fooled -- if only for a moment -- is testimony to Mirren’s miraculous transformation. Soon after Mirren was cast as “The Queen’s” title character, she went through a wardrobe and makeup test. “And she came out just looking like the queen,” Frears says.

But any director or actor will tell you that simply having a performer look the part won’t get you much beyond a good movie poster. You need first to understand, and then somehow communicate, the character’s inner life.

When you’re dealing with an intensely private person such as the English monarch, the acting-directing challenge can be monumental. “I was terrified of getting these things right. I don’t do mimicry,” Mirren says. “I was incredibly terrified about the whole preparation.”

Frears knew she was up to the challenge. “She’s very formidable,” the director says of the monarch. “She makes you nervous. And everybody says they collapse in front of the queen -- they are so gobsmacked by her. It’s like when Clint Eastwood rode into town, you knew you were beaten.”

But Frears and Mirren, who have been nominated for Oscars in their respective directing and acting categories, realized that just making Queen Elizabeth daunting -- and getting the hair and makeup spot-on and nailing the accent -- wouldn’t make for a very interesting movie. The audience needed to connect with her emotionally. And yet the monarch couldn’t wear her feelings on her sleeve.

“You have to let the audience in,” Mirren says. “But how do you let the audience in? There’s only a certain amount actors can express on their face.”

Mirren, Frears and screenwriter Peter Morgan looked closely at the queen’s dialogue, making sure she didn’t come across as too introspective. “She was very conscious of that,” Frears says of Mirren. “She knew the queen didn’t analyze herself. She didn’t go on about her feelings.”

And then the director let Mirren wander about in the world he and Morgan had created. He didn’t offer Mirren line readings; he encouraged her to try scenes again, but with little guidance.

“Impersonation is a large part of the role, but in that impersonation, you have to feel free,” Mirren says. “Stephen is the most liberal of directors. There’s a feeling of lightness, and wit. And that’s very liberating, because you otherwise would get tense and self-conscious.”

-- J.H.

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PENELOPE CRUZ AND PEDRO ALMODOVAR: MATURING RELATIONSHIP

PENELOPE CRUZ was an ingenue when she and Oscar-winning Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar collaborated for the first time on “Live Flesh.”

Now a decade and two films later -- “Talk to My Mother” and the current Academy Award-nominated “Volver” -- Almodovar says their relationship hasn’t so much changed as evolved into something deeper.

“She’s now an adult woman,” he says. “She’s more conscious of herself, of her career and her capacity of working. When I am directing Penelope, I can ask her to go further.”

Cruz, who earned an Oscar nomination for the role, describes their collaboration as akin to riding a roller coaster. “It’s like being in Disneyland for an actor,” she says. “You never know what’s going to happen because he’s always honest, which is a little bit scary. But I would much rather have somebody who can intimidate me, but guide me with the truth.”

Almodovar says that’s crucial. “She only feels safe if she knows I am telling her the truth,” he says through an interpreter, “and if I tell her everything, especially things that don’t work.”

Lengthy rehearsals were the key to their collaboration on “Volver.”

“Three months before I started the shooting we worked on the role in the physical sense, the emotional sense and the technique,” says Almodovar.

Also, he says, “we went through the dialogue. I wanted her to understand the intentions and all of the things that were in my head when I was writing the script.”

Though afternoons and evenings were spent in Almodovar’s office doing script and scene work, Cruz occupied her mornings learning skills she would need to play the character, including driving a van.

“I had cooking lessons,” she says. “I had singing lessons. I was cleaning my house because I was a bit out of training because of living in hotel rooms. I said, ‘I better learn how to move a broom because he’s going to be really angry [if I can’t].’ ”

The two hope to work together again soon. “At this moment,” says Almodovar, “my relationship with Penelope as a director and as a friend is at the highest level. It is the most mature relationship we could have.”

-- Susan King

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ALEJANDRO GONZALEZ INARRITU, ADRIANA BARRAZA AND RINKO KIKUCHI: STRIVING FOR REALISM

FILMING “Babel,” recalls director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, was akin to “orchestrating chaos.” He shot on three continents with a new cast and crew in each location, juggled five languages, an unforgiving desert and did it all for $25 million in just 100 days.

But he credits actress Adriana Barraza, who, with co-star Rinko Kikuchi, received an Oscar nomination, for enduring the greatest personal challenges of the film as Mexican nanny Amelia. She gained 30 pounds for the role and spent a week doing 70 takes in the desert in pantyhose and high heels while lugging 8-year-old Elle Fanning on her hip in 117-degree heat.

Half a dozen burly crew members were hospitalized with heat stroke. Barraza herself suffered as well but refused to be treated. “She never gave up,” said Gonzalez Inarritu, who received a directing nomination. “She was always conscious that 1,000 people die in the border every year.... That day, I wanted her to go to the hotel, [but] she kept going even with two micro heart attacks that she had.”

“All these things really don’t matter,” says Barraza, who also starred in Gonzalez Inarritu’s “Amores Perros.” “The most difficult thing for me was to create Amelia’s character so that it would be a real character and it wouldn’t be melodramatic and it wouldn’t be a cliche.”

That truthfulness was also crucial to Gonzalez Inarritu, who helped conceive the screenplay. Amelia’s story obsessed him, he says. “For me, Mexican nannies are responsible for, I think, the women’s liberation in this country,” says Gonzalez Inarritu. “Women can work because they have nannies. I think they contribute a lot to this country, but they don’t have any rights. For me it was a moral thing.”

For Kikuchi, who portrays Chieko, a deaf teenager grieving her mother’s suicide, “Babel” was a different sort of challenge. She spent nearly a year auditioning for the role, all the while studying sign language and shadowing a deaf teen, studying how she maneuvered in the world.

Since the actress and director shared no language, Gonzalez Inarritu’s direction had to be first translated from Spanish to English, then into Japanese. Ultimately, he said, he and Kikuchi relied more on nonverbal cues to communicate.

“Fortunately, there is ... body language,” said Gonzalez Inarritu. “Because the character is not using words, I sometimes had to describe with my clumsy movements. These kinds of things really worked for us. Sometimes we connected mentally. Little by little, we developed our own language.”

“Everything he said, everything he breathed, everything he had in him is something that I also needed to take into myself,” said Kikuchi of her director, by phone and through an interpreter. “Everything he wanted, everything he felt I had to be, I was careful not to miss any of them.”

-- Gina Piccalo

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ABIGAIL BRESLIN, ALAN ARKIN, VALERIE FARIS AND JONATHAN DAYTON: ONE FOR THE AGES

THERE is a delightful symmetry that Abigail Breslin and Alan Arkin each garnered Academy Award nominations for their performances in “Little Miss Sunshine.” Arkin, as the drug-taking, porn-loving fussbudget with a tender heart, and Breslin, the sweet-souled engine that inadvertently makes her family whole again, are an unlikely pair, and yet their on-screen connection and affection for each other is palpable.

“You really never know when you cast a movie,” says Valerie Faris, director of the film with her husband, Jonathan Dayton. “You don’t get to audition people together or even see them together until the first day of rehearsal. Alan was so wonderful with Abby, and she just immediately took to Alan. That’s what you hope will happen, and I do think that comes through.”

About midway through the film, the two characters share a motel room for the night, and after practicing growling -- part of the child’s upcoming pageant performance -- there is a delicately touching moment that is emotionally crucial to the film.

Breslin delivers a staggering performance as her sunny disposition turns suddenly cloudy and darkens, and she begins to cry as she confesses her fear of being a loser. Arkin, his crotchety character now in the position of counselor and cheerleader, says just the right things and cheers her right up.

Asked to recall shooting the scene, Breslin says matter-of-factly, “I thought about my grandpa. He passed away, so I was thinking about him.”

As to how he daringly disregarded an age-old show-biz axiom, Arkin says, “I’ve spent a lot of time acting with kids, and animals, and everybody says it’s difficult but I loved working with her. She’s an old pro. Abigail’s got the technique of a 40-year-old woman under that little belt.”

This is not to say Arkin wasn’t aware of the difficult sweet-and-sour balance the film sought. “The movie had a very specific tone,” he says, “and I was really concerned about that. And the first couple of days I was on tenterhooks waiting to see, ‘Is there anybody that’s going to be making jokes and rolling their eyes?’ That would be a million miles away from what Valerie and Jonathan were talking about. And as far as I’m concerned, we stayed on the same page, all of us, and it was a big sigh of relief for me.”

-- Mark Olsen