By favourite, especially in the case of contemporary film actors and directors, this does not imply fandom and that I love all their creations (in many cases, it’s downright awful), but these are people who excite and interest me, and whose new work I will seek out.

Favourite classic and 20th Century Actors actors:
Jean Arthur, Carroll Baker, Doris Day, Bette Davis, Joan Fontaine, Gloria Grahame, Ruth Hussey, Margaret Lockwood, Myrna Loy, Ida Lupino, Marilyn Monroe, Patricia Neal, Lee Remick, Barbara Stanwyck, Tuesday Weld,
Alan Bates, Harry Belafonte, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Dirk Bogarde, Humphrey Bogart, Marlon Brando, Dane Clark, Joseph Cotten, John Garfield, Cary Grant, Glenn Ford, Burt Lancaster, Peter Lorre, James Mason, Joel McCrea, Toshiro Mifune, Warren Oates, Gregory Peck, Anthony Perkins, Dean Stockwell, Orson Welles, Oskar Werner,

Favourite contemporary actors:
Juliette Binoche, Kathy Burke, Maggie Cheung, Toni Collette, Abbie Cornish, Judy Davis, Vera Farmiga, Romola Garai, Rachel Griffiths, Sally Hawkins, Isabelle Huppert, Ashley Judd, Jennifer Lawrence, Laura Linney, Samantha Morton, Gwyneth Paltrow, Natalie Press, Charlotte Rampling, Andrea Riseborough, Keri Russell, Susan Sarandon, Maggie Smith, Hilary Swank, Charlize Theron, Naomi Watts, Emily Watson
Woody Allen, Daniel Auteuil, Jeff Bridges, Andrew Buchan, Paddy Considine, Alain Chabat, Chris Cooper, Benedict Cumberbatch, Martin Donovan, Robert De Niro, Michael Fassbender, Ben Forster, Colin Firth, Gene Hackman, Woody Harrelson, Ian Holm, Paul Hilton, Tommy Lee Jones, Peter Mullan, Jamie Sam Neill, Gary Oldman, Timothy Olyphant, Jamie Parker, Guy Pearce, Sean Penn, Mark Ruffalo, Mark Rylance, Billy Bob Thornton, Ben Whishaw,

Favourite Classic and 20th Century directors:
Luis Buñuel, Robert Bresson,Alfred Hitchcock, Federico Fellini, Derek Jarman, Elia Kazan, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Fritz Lang, Louis Malle, Max Ophuls, Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, Nicholas Ray, Alain Resnais, Preston Sturges,

Favourite Contemporary Directors:
Andrea Arnold, Susanne Bier, Catherine Breillat, Jane Campion, Sofia Coppola, Claire Denis, Lucrecia Martel, Lynne Ramsay, Agnès Varda
Woody Allen, Wes Anderson, Paris Barclay, Clint Eastwood, Rodrigo Garcia, Peter Greenaway, Michael Haneke, Todd Haynes, Werner Herzog, Hsiao-hsien Hou, James Ivory, Ken Loach, David Lynch, Terrence Malick, Michael Mann, Takashi Miike, François Ozon, Roman Polanski, Carlos Reygadas, David Simon, Aleksander Sukorov, Béla Tarr, Gus Van Sant, Kar Wai Wong, Peter Weir,

Favourite classic and 20th Century writers:
Enid Blyton, The Brontës, Daphne DuMaurier, Marguerite Duras, Carson McCullers, Anais Nin, Flannery O’Connor, Sylvia Plath, Barbara Pym, Christina Stead, Elizabeth Taylor,
Roald Dahl, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Theodore Dreiser, Gustave Flaubert, E.M. Forster, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Patrick Hamilton, Henrik Ibsen, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, D.H. Lawrence, Vladimir Nabokov, W. Somerset Maugham, William Shakespeare, Patrick White, Tennessee Williams, Thornton Wilder,

Favourite contemporary writers:
Megan Abbott, Sarah Addison Allen, Francesca Lia Block, Christa Faust, Mary Gaitskill, Kirsty Gunn, Sue Monk Kidd, Yoko Ogawa, Sarah Waters,
Nicholas Baker, J.M. Coetzee Patrick McCabe, Michael Ondaatje, Orhan Pamuk, William Trevor,