CULTJAPAN!

Toshirō Mifune (1920–97) was a Japanese actor who appeared in almost 170 feature films. He is best known for his collaboration with filmmaker Akira Kurosawa in films such as Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, and Yojimbo. He is also popular for portraying Musashi Miyamoto in Hiroshi Inagaki’s Samurai Trilogy.

Mifune’s career began as a cameraman, however his acting break came when friends entered him for a “new faces” contest. This led to Mifune’s first feature role, in Shin Baka Jidai.

His imposing bearing, acting range, facility with foreign languages and lengthy partnership with acclaimed director Akira Kurosawa made him the most famous Japanese actor of his time, and easily the best known to Western audiences. He often portrayed a samurai or ronin, who was usually coarse and gruff (Kurosawa once explained that the only weakness he could find with Mifune and his acting ability was his “rough” voice), inverting the popular stereotype of the genteel, clean-cut samurai.

In such films as Seven Samurai and Yojimbo, he played characters who were often comically lacking in manners, but replete with practical wisdom and experience, understated nobility, and, in the case of Yojimbo, unmatched fighting prowess. Sanjuro in particular contrasts this earthy warrior spirit with the useless, sheltered propriety of the court samurai. 

Mifune was famous for his self-deprecating sense of humor, which often found its way into his film roles. He was renowned for the effort he put into his performances. To prepare for Seven Samurai and Rashomon, Mifune reportedly studied footage of lions in the wild; for Ánimas Trujano, he studied tapes of Mexican actors speaking, so he could recite all his lines in Spanish. In his earliest film roles in English like Grand Prix, made in 1966, he learned his lines phonetically. This met with limited success and his voice was often dubbed by Paul Frees. By the time he made Red Sun in 1971 he had become somewhat more proficient in the language and his voice is heard throughout this multinational western. He was always disappointed that he did not have a larger career in the West. His most prominent English-language role was probably playing Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto in Midway.

Mifune has been credited as originating the “roving warrior” archetype, which he perfected during his collaboration with Kurosawa. He may also be credited with originating the Yakuza archetype, with his performance as a mobster in Kurosawa’s Drunken Angel (1948), the first Yakuza film.

Most of the sixteen Kurosawa–Mifune films are considered cinema classics. These include Drunken Angel, Stray Dog, Rashomon, Seven Samurai, The Hidden Fortress, High and Low, Throne of Blood (an adaptation of Shakespeare’s MacBeth), Yojimbo, and Sanjuro.

Mifune and Kurosawa finally parted ways after Red Beard. Since Red Beard required Mifune to grow a natural beard — one he had to keep for the entirety of the film’s two years of shooting — he was unable to act in any other films during the production, putting Mifune and his financially strapped production company deeply into debt and creating friction between him and Kurosawa. Although Red Beard played to packed houses in Japan and Europe, which helped Mifune recoup some of his losses, the ensuing years held varying outcomes for both Mifune and Kurosawa.

After the film’s release Mifune continued to enjoy success with a range of samurai and war-themed films (Rebellion, Samurai Assassin, the Emperor and a General, among others). In contrast, Kurosawa’s output of films dwindled and drew mixed responses.

Mifune received wider audience acclaim in the West than he ever had after playing Toranaga in the 1980 miniseries Shogun. However, the series’ historically accurate yet blunt portrayal of the Japanese shogunate and the greatly abridged version shown in Japan meant that it was not as well received in his homeland.

While Kurosawa made some very uncharitable comments about Mifune’s acting, he also admitted in an interview in Interview magazine that ‘all the films that I made with Mifune, without him, they would not exist.’ He also presented Mifune with the Kawashita award which he himself had won two years prior. They finally made something of a reconciliation in 1993 at the funeral of their friend Ishiro Honda. After making tenuous eye contact, they tearfully embraced one another, ending nearly three decades of mutual avoidance.

Mifune on Kurosawa: “I am proud of nothing I have done other than with him.”

Kurosawa on Mifune: “Mifune had a kind of talent I had never encountered before in the Japanese film world. It was, above all, the speed with which he expressed himself that was astounding. The ordinary Japanese actor might need ten feet of film to get across an impression; Mifune needed only three. The speed of his movements was such that he said in a single action what took ordinary actors three separate movements to express. He put forth everything directly and boldly, and his sense of timing was the keenest I had ever seen in a Japanese actor. And yet with all his quickness, he also had surprisingly fine sensibilities.” – Akira Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article “Toshirō Mifune“.