Bogart and Bacall or Burton and Taylor may have forged off-screen partnerships from their on-screen chemistry, but Kathleen Turner and William Hurt take the title of the greatest screen couple of all time.
According to a survey published today by Heat magazine, Body Heat, the 1981 film noir in which an attorney and a married woman plot her wealthy husband’s death, was the top screen partnership.
Second was To Have and Have Not, the 1944 film in which the old hand Humphrey Bogart met and fell for the newcomer Lauren Bacall, while Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor’s tragic pairing in Cleopatra, made in 1963, was at 11.
A panel of 100 film enthusiasts, including actor Nick Nolte, critic Barry Norman, writer Richard Curtis, and director John Madden, compiled the list of 25 partnerships, ranking them for their electricity and magnetism.
Former ER star George Clooney’s pairing with Jennifer Lopez in Out of Sight came third, with the unusual choice of Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette in Quentin Tarantino’s True Romance at fourth. Spencer Tracey and Katherine Hepburn were fifth for their roles in the 1949 film Adam’s Rib, with Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd’s long-running sexual tension in the TV detective series Moonlighting sixth. Friends stars David Schwimmer and Jennifer Aniston are the only other television couple to make it into the top 25.
One actor features twice. Steve McQueen is at 20 with Ally MacGraw, his second wife, for the Getaway, but is ranked 10 with Faye Dunaway in the 1968 version of The Thomas Crown Affair; the stars of this year’s remake, Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo, came 17th with their version.
Julia Roberts and Richard Gere, recently reunited for the Runaway Bride, were at 14 for their roles as hooker and businessman in Pretty Woman - beaten by Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke in the chronicle of obsessive sex, Nine and a Half Weeks.
Not all the 25 are romances. Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie get in at 24 for the 1974 psychological horror film Don’t Look Now. The chaste pairing of Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher as Han Solo and Princess Leia, who barely kiss in the entire trilogy of Star Wars films, came 15, above Beatrice Dalle and Jean-Hugues Anglade in Betty Blue.
Despite making three films together - Days of Thunder, Far and Away, and the erotic Eyes Wide Shut - the husband and wife team of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman are not on the list. They can take some consolation however, since a companion poll of Heat’s readers pronounced them the world’s sexiest celebrity couple.
