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Toshiro Mifune

Japan's 'Samuri' Screen Actor Toshiro Mifune Dead at 77

By Teruaki Ueno

TOKYO (Reuters) - Acclaimed screen actor Toshiro Mifune, star of the Japan's classic movies "Rashomon" and "The Seven Samurai," died Wednesday, December 24th, in a Tokyo hospital.

Mifune, 77, also starred in the popular 1980 television series "Shogun." A spokesman for his family had no immediate details on the cause of his death, but he had been ill for some time.

For nearly 40 years, Mifune, with his vivid portrayals of powerful warlords, noble peasants and disillusioned modern men, ruled Japanese cinema, becoming the country's best known film actor abroad.

His swaggering rendition of the peasant-turned-samurai (warrior) in the 1954 Akira Kurosawa classic "The Seven Samurai" and his cynical bandit in Kurosawa's 1950 "Rashomon" established his reputation as one of cinema's greatest actors.

In a 1984 magazine survey, Mifune was chosen the most Japanese man among men, the one whose face expressed the best of Japanese pride, power and virility.

Mifune got his start in movies in 1947, at Toho Studios in Tokyo. Born in Tsingtao, China, on April 1, 1920, and raised overseas, he worked as an aerial photographer during World War Two.

When he first set foot in his new homeland at age 25, he faced the poor job prospects of poverty-stricken postwar Japan. He called on a friend at Toho to introduce him as a technician.

But just at that time, directors were eager for a new face, and Mifune's resume was shunted to the casting department, which appreciated his burly looks as a contrast to the more delicately handsome stars of the day.

"They told me, 'You have a gangster's face, you ought to do well in this,"' Mifune said later. "But then they told me to cry, and I said, 'How can I cry when I'm not sad?' Then they asked me to get angry, and I got too angry and failed the test."

Kurosawa intervened, however, and Mifune's career took off.

"Mifune had a kind of talent I had never encountered before in the Japanese film world," Kurosawa wrote in his autobiography, recalling "Drunken Angel," their first film together, made in 1948.

"It was, above all, the speed with which he expressed himself that was astounding. The ordinary Japanese actor might need 10 feet of film to get across an impression: Mifune needed only 3 feet..."

"He put forth everything directly and boldly, and his sense of timing was the keenest I had ever seen in a Japanese actor," Kurosawa continued. "And yet with all his quickness, he also had surprisingly fine sensibilities."

Within three years, they made "Rashomon," a film which has been called "the ultimate statement of the unknowability of truth."

"Rashomon" introduced Kurosawa, Mifune and Japanese film to the West when it won the Grand Prix award at the 1951 Venice International Film Festival.

During his career, Mifune won more than 60 individual acting prizes, and more than 70 of his 134 films have won Japanese or international awards. Among the films honored abroad were Kurosawa's "Yojimbo," made in 1961, and "Red Beard," made in 1964, both of which won Mifune the Venice Film Festival Actor's Prize, making him the only actor to have received the prestigious prize twice.

Mifune appeared in many foreign films, first as a drunken peasant in the 1961 award-winning Mexican film, "Animas Trujano: El Hombre Importante," and as a warlord in the American television series "Shogun" in 1980. He starred with Alain Delon and Charles Bronson in the Franco-Japanese "Red Sun" in 1972.

Although Mifune's name became synonymous with samurai and historical dramas, he also appeared in many films about the plight of modern man in Japan.

Mifune established Mifune Productions in 1963, when he also took his only stab at directing in "Gojumannin no Isan" (The Inheritance of 500,000 People), a box-office flop and personally exhausting, he said.

In addition to the credits listed above, he also protrayed Japan's legendary swordsman Miamoto Musashi (author of "The Book of Five Rings") in several semi-biographical films (Samurai 1, 2 & 3). He starred with Charles Bronson in an unlikely film "Red Sun" about a samurai warrior who is stuck with a cowboy (Bronson) in a quest to recover a stolen Japanese sword during a diplomatic trip to the American West. Other well known films in America include "1941" (1979) with John Belushi, "Midway" with Peter Fonda (and a whole slew of other stars), and "Hell in the Pacific" with Lee Marvin.