Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune (April 1, 1920 - December 24, 1997) was very talented and prolific. He became famous primarily due to his numerous collaborations with Akira Kurosawa (he played in almost all Kurosawa films shot between 1948 and 1965), as well as many other leading roles.
How did it all start?
According to legend, Mifune’s career was random. Toshiro Mifune needed work, and a friend told him that the studio was hiring staff. When he got there, he was in the wrong place, and ended up in the audition. Mifune, as you know, was a real favorite of the team, often shared food with them and helped them with errands during filming, partly because he knew how unplanned and accidental his own acting career was. The first film in which the actor appeared was called “On the Other Side of the Silver Ridge”.
His second film was Yamamoto's “black” comedy about post-war Japan “These Silly Times” (Shin baka jidai, 1947).
Mifune and Kurosawa
Recalling his early collaboration, Kurosawa later described in his biography Toshiro Mifune:
“He had such a talent that I had never met in the Japanese world of cinema. It was, first of all, the speed with which he expressed himself, which was amazing. Ordinary Japanese actors may need ten feet of film to get the right impression. Mifune needed only three.
His sense of time was the sharpest I have ever seen with a Japanese actor. And yet, with all his quickness, he also had surprisingly subtle feelings. ”
Kurosawa Filming
Between 1948 and 1965, Kurosawa directed Toshiro Mifune in the lead roles in the 17 films he worked on during that period. It all started with the “Drunk Angel” (Yoidore tenshi) in 1948. Then there were such masterpieces as:
- "Rashomon" (1950).
- The Seven Samurai (Shichinin no samurai, 1954).
- “I live in fear” (Ikimono no kiroku, 1955).
- The Throne of Blood (Kumonosu-jo, 1957).
- “The bad ones sleep peacefully” (Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemoru, 1960).
- Yojimbo (1961).
- “Rise and fall” (Tengoku to jigoku, 1963).
- The Red Beard (Akahige, 1964), etc.
Kurosawa adapted the roles to the special abilities of his extraordinary star actor. And all this time, Mifune’s significant talents have grown and developed. The film, which hit Toshiro Mifune after a fateful audition in 1946, was not made by Kurosawa. He was first introduced as one of the leading actors in Snow Trail (Ginrei no hate, also known as “Beyond the Silver Ridge”). The original script for this film was written by Kurosawa for his friend, the young director Senkichi Taniguchi. Both of them, Kurosawa and Taniguchi, worked as assistants to Kajiro Yamamoto, who remained a mentor for both of them, as well as for a new talented actor, at whose audition he attended. In Snow Trail, Mifune himself performed dangerous tricks.
Kurosawa and Mifune's collaboration began in 1948 with The Drunken Angel. Akira Kurosawa by that time was already a recognized director who shot six films. In this film, Toshiro Mifune played a rather small role: a young bully, who is trying to cure the main character. According to the scenario, the doctor was supposed to be the main character of the film. However, the bright talent of Mifune led to the fact that his hero became central in this story. This was far from the last film that Toshiro actually “stole”.
The actor most often played quite quiet, sophisticated heroes, gentlemen, but in his career the characters were wild, indomitable, strong. For example, “Stray Dog” (1949), where he played a policeman; "Rashomon" (1950), where he was a gangster; “Seven Samurai” (1954th) - the role of Kikuchio (this role was his favorite); the role of Miyamoto Musashi in the film Samurai: The Way of the Warrior (1954); disinterested Matsu in The Rikishi Man (1958) and his own version of Cyrano de Bergerac in The Samurai Saga (1959).
Acting talent
Toshiro Mifune also became the personification of a certain type of actor, whose skill goes back to classical Japanese theater. His manner corresponded to the traditional performance of heroic roles, tatiyaku (the main male role), characters who appeared on the stage directly from the pages of epic military novels and legends about samurai.
This heroic type was opposed by softer, more tender romantic heroes of love dramas. Mifune played heroic roles for a long time, and as a result, there were almost no love scenes in his long career. Nevertheless, he managed to fill the type of tatiyaku with more complex and deep feelings.
Dramatic roles
Kurosawa's films in the mid-1950s, Mifune's roles, and the scripts Kurosawa wrote to him had a lot of Shakespearean drama. So, in the role of impulsive Kikuchio in “Seven Samurai”, Toshiro Mifune never allows the viewer to forget the tragic origin of the character: he is not just an ambitious samurai, he is a peasant, orphaned in infancy and now representing himself as a samurai, although he hates the dominant power of this class. In the role of the elderly patriarch in the film “I live in fear” (Mifune, 35, plays a man twice his age), he played a man who succumbed to the fear of impending nuclear destruction. In the film “Throne of Blood”, Kurosawa’s magnificent transfer of Macbeth to medieval Japan, Mifune combines Shakespeare’s traditions with those of the Japanese military sagas and No theater.
In the film “At the Bottom” (Kurosawa’s adaptation of Gorky’s play of the same name) Mifune was able to combine comedy, pompous swagger and romantic aspirations in his game. Finally, in the film “The Bad Sleep Peacefully” Mifune plays a modern, psychologically complex role: his hero fights with conscience and moral principles, his furious will to act is restrained by fear or cunning.
Break with Kurosawa
Mifune and Kurosawa quarreled in the late 1960s after filming Red Beard, and after that Mifune appeared periodically in Western films such as The Big Prize and Hell in the Pacific. This ultimately led to the appearance of Mifune in the American TV series Shogun (Toranaga), as a result of which he was recognized in America but criticized in Japan for lack of historical accuracy.
Between 1993 and 1997, Kurosawa and Mifune held several meetings with each other at funerals and award ceremonies. Especially memorable was the meeting at the funeral in 1993 of their mutual friend, director of Godzilla Ishiro Honda. It seemed that their relationship began to recover. It was rumored that they were going to work again, but Mifune died in 1997, and Kurosawa - a year after him. They say that Mifune actually died of despair: his health was damaged after a heart attack caused by stress, but his ex-wife Satiko Yoshimin helped him overcome this, and when she suddenly died of cancer, his physical and mental condition worsened, and he simply lost the will to live.
Characters characters
Over time, Mifune developed his comedian talent, while giving some roles stunning wisdom. These sardonic characters, such as roving heroes in Yojimbo (1961) and Sanjuro (1962), represent another type of his roles, “the good bad guy”. As anti-heroes, these people can be thieves or crooks, as in the “Vagabond Saga” (Sengoku guntoden, 1959), “Gambling Samurai” (Kunisada Chuji, 1960) or “Ambush in the Death Gorges” (Machibuse, 1970 -th), but they know what is right and fair.
In other films with Toshiro Mifune - “Red Beard” (Akahige, 1964), Rebellion (Joiuchi, 1966), “Gang of Assassins” (Shinsen-gumi, 1970) - his characters are obsessed with some specific purpose . All were convinced "samurai" who dedicated their energy to what they thought was right. The most notable of these is the role of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the revered Japanese hero whom Mifune portrayed in several films, including Storm over the Pacific Ocean (Taiheyo no Arashi, 1960), Midway (1976 ) and Admiral Yamamoto (Yamamoto Isoroku, 1968).
However, Mifune’s own military experience was far from the elite career of the great Japanese admiral. In 1940, only after graduating from school in Manchuria, he joined the Imperial Air Force. At that time he was twenty years old. Mifune’s personal military experience was hardly heroic. Unlike the great warlords or brilliant officers he portrayed in some of his films, his own memories are closer to the roles he played in some other films: Outpost of Despair (Dokuritsu gurentai, 1959), about a group of soldiers who found themselves outlaw; The Fort Cemetery (Chi to suna, 1964); “Hell in the Pacific Ocean” (1968), where he played a soldier who found himself on a desert island; and even his role in The Seven Samurai.
In his career there were many roles of "ordinary man." A desperate young policeman in Stray Dog; amiable worker in the city center ("Shitamachi"); impulsive Matsu in Rikishi Man; Tetsu is a fisherman in Yakoman and Tetsu.
International career
The international fame and career of the Japanese movie star was promoted by the following awards: Rasemon won the Grand Prix at the Venice Film Festival in 1953, and the following year won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Mifune's performance as the Tajomaru gangster stunned audiences and critics around the world, and soon came new, equally outstanding roles in a number of Kurosawa films, which earned rave reviews and numerous awards.
Mifune also starred in films by other Japanese directors: Life of Oharu by Kenji Mizoguchi (Saikaku ichidai onna, 1952); Miyamoto Musashi “Hiroshi Inagaki” (1954th) and “Rikishi Man” (1958th). They were also well received abroad and strengthened Mifune's position as an outstanding Japanese actor.
Toshiro Mifune Awards
For his roles in the films Yojimbo (The Bodyguard) and Red Beard, he won the Best Actor prize at the Venice Film Festival and was the only actor to receive this prestigious award twice.
Thanks to his role in the film The Bodyguard, Toshiro Mifune was on the list of the hundred greatest roles. Several times he was awarded the title of best actor for his roles in the films "Throne of Blood", "Red Beard", "Tora-san travels to the north." Also in 1998, he was posthumously awarded the Japan Academy Award.
Director and producer
Toshiro Mifune's career was not limited to acting. In 1963, he created his own production company, and in the same year he directed his first (and last) film, The Inheritance of Five Hundred Thousands (Gojumannin no isan), as a director. He also starred in it as a war veteran kidnapped by a luck hunter to find gold left by Japanese soldiers in the Philippines.
This film did not evoke tender memories from Mifune. Nevertheless, he continued to produce films as a producer, and appeared in a dozen of his own productions. First of all, in Uprising, which was named the best film of 1967 in Japan and was internationally successful.
Mifune Productions also contributed to the creation of some foreign films in which he starred: Hell in the Pacific, Challenge. The company currently includes an acting school, now it is mainly engaged in the production of television films and supports studios near Toho, where the great actor passed that same significant audition.
A family
Toshiro Mifune's personal life was not as successful as his career. In 1950, he married actress Sachiko Yoshimin. They lived together for 15 years, but Toshiro still left her with two children. In part, this provoked a quarrel between Mifune and Kurosawa, who was a conservative in such matters. And only after the actor became seriously ill, he reconciled with his ex-wife.