Mifune Toshiro is familiar to Western audiences primarily for her role in Akira Kurosawa’s film “The Seven Samurai”. But in general, during his career (it lasted more than forty years), the actor starred in approximately 180 films. On the "Walk of Fame" in Hollywood, you can see a separate star Mifune Toshiro. She appeared here in 2016.
Beginning of film career and international recognition
The future film actor was born in 1920 in China - his parents worked there (but they were not Chinese, but Japanese citizens). Mifune also received the citizenship of the Land of the Rising Sun. On this basis, he was drafted into the army during the Second World War. He served in the aerial photography department of the Japanese Air Force.
After being demobilized, Toshiro got a job in Tokyo as an assistant cameraman at the Tojo studio. And soon he first tried himself as an actor - starred in the films “On the Other Side of the Silver Ridge” and “The Time of the New Fools” (both of them were released in 1947).
At the same time, on one of the sets, he met with the director Akira Kurosawa. And Mifune got his next work precisely in Kurasawa's painting entitled “The Drunken Angel”. In general, this creative tandem was extremely fruitful: Mifune starred in 16 films of Kurosawa. Some of them brought international recognition to both the actor and the director. Here it is worth recalling such films as “Rashomon”, “At the Bottom”, “Idiot” (by the way, based on the novel by Dostoevsky), “Throne in the Blood” and, of course, “Seven Samurai”. This masterpiece tells how seven impoverished samurai save the village and its ordinary inhabitants from a brutal gang. And Mifune played here the samurai impostor Kikutiyo.
But, perhaps, the actor’s most dramatic talent was revealed in the films Musashi Miyamoto (1954) and Bodyguard (1961, Venice Film Festival Award), Red Beard (1965, Venice Film Festival Award). The role of doctor Niide in "Red Beard" is considered the pinnacle of Mifune's work.
At a certain point, Mifune is beginning to be invited to participate in international film projects, for example, in the films "The Red Sun" (Alain Delon also starred here) and "1941" (directed by Stephen Spielberg), in the series "Shogun". The British Film Institute even called Mifune the most famous actor from Japan in the Western world.
