Husbands and wives club

The Oscar favourite Sideways stars the director's partner. Roger Clarke looks at a motley history of such collaborations

If a director and and actress click, Quentin Tarantino once said, "only a husband and wife, or a father and daughter, share the same level of intimacy". But what if the director and actress are husband and wife to start with?

In the Oscar-nominated comedy Sideways (out this week) Alexander Payne decided to direct his wife, Sandra Oh, for the first time. She plays a woman working in a vineyard who dates the about-to-be-married Thomas Haden Church. "She actually had to obey me - that was so nice," Payne recalls. And, this week, Kevin Bacon is taking his second self-directed film, Loverboy, with his wife Kyra Sedgwick, to the Sundance festival, having previously cast her in his award-winning paedophile drama The Woodsman (out in the UK this spring). Directing your wife is a dangerous business, though - just ask Guy Ritchie.

Some directors who met their wives through central casting - Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg are examples - chose never to cast their wives in their own films again. Perhaps they're right to be wary. History shows the DNA of many a catastrophic director/actress marriage preserved on-screen. Just what was Judy Garland doing falling in love with Vincente Minnelli in Meet Me in St Louis when the result was a gay husband and Liza Minnelli? How painfully obvious is the estrangement of Rita Hayworth from Orson Welles in The Lady from Shanghai - the film that marked the final nail in his Hollywood coffin, the onset of their divorce and Hayworth's last contract movie for Columbia Pictures? And how sad and difficult it is to watch Sharon Tate in Roman Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers without recalling her occult-influenced murder at 10050 Cielo Drive?

Polanski fell for Tate during the filming of The Fearless Vampire Killers in much the same way that Olivier Assayas did for Maggie Cheung in Irma Vep and Woody Allen did for Mia Farrow In A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy (though not actually married we always felt they were - Hannah and Her Sisters and Husbands and Wives resonate with their final, bitter estrangement). The Assayas-Cheung marriage only lasted a few years, as they were constantly filming apart.

Irma Vep is a very good example of a male director turning an actress into a fantasy figure and then marrying her. It is reminiscent of Tarantino's fetishisation of Uma Thurman in Kill Bill - featuring similar slinky leather and form-hugging jumpsuits. You can see the same dynamic at work with Luc Besson and Milla Jovovich in The Fifth Element; Besson's camera just can't get enough of her lissom, tangerine-haired alien in Jean Paul Gaultier rags. They reunited two years later for his ill-fated Joan of Arc saga The Messenger. He made her look like a boy and it was all over.

It seems that within the breast of many a married actress there beats the heart of a medieval virgin-martyr, and a whole treatise could be written on the pathology of men who direct their wives as Joan of Arc. Its an international phenomenon that goes from the obscure (Russia's greatest living actress, Inna Churikova, filmed the story with her husband at the helm in 1970) to the very well-known (Ingrid Bergman created several versions of the Joan of Arc story with husband Roberto Rossellini, having also made a 1948 version for Victor Fleming). The marriage of Bergman and Rossellini is book-ended by Joan of Arc; her obsession with la Pucelle was so intense that she carried soil from Domremy in her pocket for many years. "I've gone from saint to whore and back to saint again, all in one lifetime," she said, after the marriage ended. She made Joan of Arc at the Stake in 1954 and they divorced in 1957.

She had fallen for Rossellini on the set of Stromboli, become pregnant, and abandoned her child and husband of 13 years to be with the Italian. The public never forgave her. Rossellini's vision of his wife, piously caparisoned in armour and chained to a stake, is a curious image to mark the end of a marriage.

But its not always trouble and strife. There is a breed of director who simply cannot do without their wife in a lead role. Robert Guédiguian barely makes any of his socially-conscious Marseilles-based films without his wife, Ariane Ascaride. In many ways her thin, strong visage is the actual face of her husband's work; even when she appears in other movies she takes a whiff of the red flag waved in the soft Marseilles air from the likes of Marius et Jeannette. In that movie, where she plays a worker who gets sacked for her strident communism, one sees exactly why the former communist agitator Guédiguian married her.

The same is probably true of the wife of Federico Fellini, Giulietta Masina, whom he married in 1943. His first truly independent work was The White Sheik, in 1952, and it featured Masina - albeit briefly - as a prostitute. Two years later, his first masterpiece, La Strada, had a plum role for her as the simple and clownish girl Gelsomina, who is "purchased" by the brutish circus strongman Anthony Quinn.

The critic Roger Ebert praised her "Chaplinesque innocence that somehow shields her from the worst of life" and she seemed to represent much of the personal and autobiographical qualities of Fellini's masterpieces.

In 1990, when Fellini received an honorary Oscar, she was on hand in the audience. It remains one of the most successful and long-lasting marriages in the movies.

Many admirers of Jean-Luc Godard believe his best work was when he was married to Anna Karina - again for a while the "face" and muse of the auteur - and that both their careers declined when they divorced in 1967 after a six-year marriage.

On the whole, it is hard not to agree with Quentin Tarantino's assessment of the actress/director dynamic. "Directors are... by and large the most butt-ugly, motley group of geeks found this side of a Star Trek convention". He concludes that "no woman would give... a second glance if they weren't a director".

All the same, Alexander Payne is one of Hollywood's better-looking directors and the public will see a handsome couple at the Oscars. Asked about directing his wife in a sex scene, he shrugged and said "I didn't see her as my wife, I saw her as just another of these pieces of meat I put in front of the camera". Payne, you understand, is not a man who dwells sentimentally on things: "I wouldn't have hired her if she wasn't perfect for the part".

He admits to giving his Seoul-born Asian-Canadian wife only one direction - when she beats up Thomas Haden Church for not being honest about his single status. "I need to see 1,600 years of Korean rage against the oppressor," he shouted as she began to pummel the actor in question.

She seems, I am obliged to note, especially good at it.