Mifune, Toshiro

▪ 1998

      Japanese actor (b. April 1, 1920, Qingdao province, China—d. Dec. 24, 1997, near Tokyo, Japan), was the archetypal samurai sword-wielding warrior in a series of period films by director Akira Kurosawa and became a screen idol with his magnetic screen persona, which he could quickly transform for dramatic, tragic, and comedic roles. Mifune was born to Japanese parents in China and served during World War II in the Japanese Imperial Air Force. He appeared in small film roles shortly before starring in Kurosawa's Drunken Angel (1948) as an angry gangster, a role that established his powerful screen presence. In Rashomon (1950) he secured his reputation as a lightning-quick samurai hero and linked his rising star with that of Kurosawa; the two made 16 films together between 1948 and 1965, including such masterpieces as The Seven Samurai (1954) and Yojimbo (1961), which were remade as Hollywood westerns called, respectively, The Magnificent Seven and A Fistful of Dollars. Although he appeared as a samurai in about half of his more than 120 films, he also appeared in Kurosawa's adaptations of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Idiot (1951), Maksim Gorky's The Lower Depths (1957), and Throne of Blood (1957), modeled after Shakespeare's Macbeth. He portrayed Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, the architect of the attack on Pearl Harbor, in Storm over the Pacific (1960) and reprised the role for the American-made Midway (1976). In the U.S., however, he was perhaps best known as the warlord Toranaga in the 1980 television miniseries Shogun, an adaptation of James Clavell's novel. Mifune also established (1963) his own company, Mifune Productions, and directed one film before seizing his sword on-screen once again.

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