Akira Kurosawa

WHY SHOULD WE CARE?
Because Kurosawa's mix of Eastern and Western styles and stories had a massive impact on other film-makers - including Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. And, when his 1951 samurai epic Rashomon stunned the Venice film festival, winning the top prize, it opened lazy Western eyes to the wealth of Japanese movies that already existed.

WHAT SORT OF FILMS IS HE FAMOUS FOR?
Action epics conceived and mounted on a grand scale.

WHEN WAS HE WORKING?
Born in Tokyo in 1910, Kurosawa entered art school at the age of 17 and followed it with an unsuccessful stint as a commercial artist. In the mid-1930s he was hired as assistant and scriptwriter by film director Kajiro Yamamoto at Photo Chemical Laboratories. By the time the lab had changed its name to the famous Toho Studios, Kurosawa had become a fledgling director in his own right. His glory years were the '50s and '60s, during which time he made a string of movies that are on every "all-time best" list going - Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Throne Of Blood (1957) and Yojimbo (1961).

After the failure of 1970's Dodes' Kaden, a bout of depression and a bitter row with long-time acting collaborator Toshiro Mifune, Kurosawa tried to kill himself, bouncing back in style with an Oscar for Best Foreign Film for the Soviet-sponsored Dersu Uzala (1975). His second creative wind came in the 1980s with historical epics Kagemusha and Ran. He died in the city of his birth in 1998.

WHO DID HE WORK WITH?
Kurosawa had two great acting partners: Takashi Shimura and Toshiro Mifune. Over sixteen films, from 1948's Drunken Angel to 1965's Red Beard, Mifune and Kurosawa enjoyed an actor-director relationship that's up there with Scorsese and De Niro, Ford and Wayne. Mifune provided the fiery, physical aspect of the director's vision ("It was, above all, the speed with which he expressed himself that was astounding," wrote Kurosawa. "The ordinary Japanese actor might need ten feet of film to get across an impression; Mifune needed only three. He put forth everything directly and boldly.")
Already a veteran by the time Mifune came on the scene, Shimura was the more humane, internalised element in the director's art: a warm and, to western viewers, more instantly engaging man. Kurosawa brilliantly played on the dynamics of their contrasting styles in Drunken Angel (Shimura is the kindly doctor, Mifune a young hoodlum) and Seven Samurai (Shimura is the thoughtful tactician, Mifune the irrepressible, noisy, bursting-with-energy hanger-on).