TOSHIRO MIFUNE, JAPAN’S WORLD-FAMOUS SCREEN WARRIOR, DIES AT 77

TOKYO, 1997-12-24. — Toshiro Mifune, whose fierce energy and extraordinary physical command made him the most widely recognised Japanese film actor of his generation, died today in Mitaka, Tokyo. He was 77. His death was attributed to multiple organ failure. In a career extending across half a century, Mifune played warriors, policemen, industrialists and military commanders, becoming familiar far beyond Japan through both Japanese productions and international films. For audiences who first encountered Japanese cinema through Rashomon or Seven Samurai, his face and voice became inseparable from the discovery of an entire national film culture.

The central partnership of his career was with the director Akira Kurosawa. Their 16 films together, beginning with Drunken Angel in 1948 and ending with Red Beard in 1965, produced a succession of markedly different characters united by an exceptional force of personality. Mifune could suggest menace before speaking and turn apparent brutality into comedy with a sudden movement. His performances were not confined to the rigid dignity sometimes associated abroad with Japanese historical drama. They could be dishevelled, impatient, mocking and explosively emotional, exposing the disorder beneath uniforms, social ranks and ceremonial manners.

Born on April 1, 1920, in Qingdao, China, to Japanese parents, Mifune grew up in Dalian and worked in his father’s photographic business. During the war he served in the Japanese military, where his photographic experience was put to use. He came to Japan after the surrender, entering a country struggling with destruction, shortages and the upheaval of defeat. His route into films was not the customary progress of a young stage performer seeking leading roles. He initially sought work connected with photography, but an audition at Toho brought his presence to the attention of the studio’s filmmakers.

His first released film was Snow Trail in 1947, directed by Senkichi Taniguchi from a screenplay by Kurosawa. The following year, Drunken Angel established the essential promise of the new actor. Playing a tubercular gangster opposite Takashi Shimura’s doctor, Mifune brought the tensions of the post-war city into a performance at once swaggering and vulnerable. Kurosawa subsequently recalled in his autobiography: “Mifune had a kind of talent I had never encountered before in the Japanese film world.” That assessment came from a director whose exacting demands would help shape the actor’s most celebrated work.

International recognition followed Rashomon, in which Mifune played the bandit at the centre of conflicting accounts of a violent encounter. The film won the Golden Lion at Venice in 1951 and subsequently received an honorary Academy Award. Its success gave foreign distributors and critics compelling reason to look more closely at Japanese production. Mifune’s performance was no restrained introduction to an unfamiliar cinema: his laughter, agitation and physical boldness helped make the picture unforgettable. Yet the film’s competing narratives also denied audiences a simple verdict on the man he played, placing his forceful presence within an unusually elusive story.

Seven Samurai, released in 1954, gave him another defining part, Kikuchiyo, the unruly outsider whose claim to warrior status conceals his origins among the peasants. The role demanded humour, humiliation, anger and grief as well as action. In Throne of Blood, Kurosawa’s 1957 adaptation of Macbeth, Mifune instead embodied a commander destroyed by ambition and fear. Yojimbo, in 1961, made his calculating, unkempt swordsman the centre of a violent struggle between rival factions. He won Venice’s acting prize for that performance and won it again for Red Beard four years later.

Kurosawa’s account of the actor’s technique helps explain why these characters travelled so readily across linguistic boundaries. “The ordinary Japanese actor might need ten feet of film to get across an impression; Mifune needed only three,” he wrote. Such economy was not simply a matter of moving quickly. A posture, a glance or an abrupt change of rhythm could establish the balance of power in a scene. The same gifts served Mifune outside period costume. In High and Low, released in 1963, his prosperous executive confronts a kidnapping crisis in a modern world of business calculation, domestic security and moral obligation.

The partnership with Kurosawa ended after Red Beard, but Mifune’s international career continued. He appeared with Lee Marvin in John Boorman’s Hell in the Pacific, a 1968 drama built around an American and a Japanese serviceman stranded on an island. Red Sun placed him alongside Charles Bronson and Alain Delon in a Western released in 1971. He played Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto in Midway in 1976. These productions used his authority in differing ways, sometimes giving him a substantial dramatic contest and sometimes relying on the immediate recognition and gravity he brought to the screen.

Television carried that recognition into still more homes. As Toranaga in the 1980 adaptation of James Clavell’s Shogun, Mifune occupied the centre of a drama through which many Western viewers encountered an elaborate representation of feudal Japan. The role again depended upon the audience believing that calculation and power lay behind every apparently measured gesture. His work also extended beyond acting through his own production company. His final screen appearances included the 1995 film Deep River, leaving a body of work much broader than the sword-bearing image most frequently reproduced on posters and in foreign publicity.

The commercial importance of that career cannot be measured by a single box-office return. Rashomon and the films that followed helped make Japanese pictures viable attractions at overseas festivals, specialist cinemas and, eventually, on television and home video. Mifune became a recognisable name in a market where comparatively few Japanese actors enjoyed that advantage. There was a cultural consequence as well: audiences abroad encountered Japanese characters with individuality, contradictions and commanding dramatic authority. His work did not constitute an official political programme, but its circulation belonged to the larger post-war restoration of Japan’s international cultural presence.

Mifune’s death closes a career that joined the Japanese studio system, the international festival circuit and large-scale commercial entertainment. Kurosawa survives him, and their films remain the clearest record of an artistic association whose range resists reduction to a single heroic type. The immediate task for exhibitors, broadcasters and critics is not merely to repeat the familiar image of the swordsman, but to show the gangster, the frightened commander, the businessman and the doctor beside him. The performances already exist to support that fuller account. They reveal an actor whose authority rested as much on human frailty as on strength.