Toshiro Mifune Dies...

[Don Kuramura]

I got this from the CNN web site this morning...
http://cnn.com/WORLD/asiapcf/9712/24/RB000740.reut.html

-Don


                      Japan's Samurai" film actor
                      Mifune dead

                      25 December 1997
                      Web posted at: 03:40 JST, Tokyo time (18:40 GMT)

                      TOKYO, Dec 24 (Reuters) - Acclaimed Japanese film actor
                      Toshiro Mifune, star of the country's classic movies "Rashomon"
                      and "The Seven Samurai," died on Wednesday in a Tokyo hospital.

                      Mifune, 77, was also a star of the popular 1980 television series
                      "Shogun."

                      A spokesman for his family had no immediate details on the cause
                      of his death but he had been ill for some time.

                      For nearly 40 years, Mifune, with his vivid portrayals of powerful
                      warlords, noble peasants and disillusioned modern men, ruled
                      Japanese cinema, becoming the country's best known film actor
                      abroad.

                      His swaggering rendition of the peasant-turned-samurai (warrior) in
                      the 1954 Akira Kurosawa classic "The Seven Samurai" and his
                      cynical bandit in Kurosawa's 1950 "Rashomon" established his
                      reputation as one of cinema's greatest actors.

                      In a 1984 magazine survey, Mifune was chosen the most Japanese
                      man among men, the one whose face expressed the best of
                      Japanese pride, power and virility.

                      Mifune got his start in movies in 1947, at Toho Studios in Tokyo.

                      Born in Tsingtao, China on April 1, 1920 and raised overseas, he
                      worked as an aerial photographer during World War Two.

                      When he first set foot in his homeland at age 25, he faced the poor
                      job prospects of poverty-stricken postwar Japan. He called on a
                      friend at Toho to introduce him as a technician.

                      But just at that time, directors were eager for a new face, and
                      Mifune's resume was shunted to the casting department, which
                      appreciated his burly looks as a contrast to the delicately handsome
                      stars of the day.

                      "They told me, 'You have a gangster's face, you ought to do well in
                      this'," Mifune said later, "But then they told me to cry, and I said,
                      'How can I cry when I'm not sad ?' Then they asked me to get
                      angry, and I got too angry and failed the test."

                      Kurosawa intervened, however, and Mifune's career took off.
                      "Mifune had a kind of talent I had never encountered before in the
                      Japanese film world," Kurosawa wrote in his autobiography,
                      recalling "Drunken Angel," their first film together, made in 1948.

                      "It was, above all, the speed with which he expressed himself that
                      was astounding. The ordinary Japanese actor might need 10 feet of
                      film to get across an impression: Mifune needed only three feet..."

                      "He put forth everything directly and boldly and his sense of timing
                      was the keenest I had ever seen in a Japanese actor," Kurosawa
                      continued. "And yet with all his quickness he also had surprisingly
                      fine sensibilities."

                      Within three years, they made "Rashomon," a film which has been
                      called "the ultimate statement of the unknowability of truth."

                      "Rashomon" introduced Kurosawa, Mifune and Japanese film to the
                      West when it won the Grand Prix award at the 1951 Venice
                      International Film Festival.

                      In his career, Mifune won over 60 individual acting prizes and more
                      than 70 of his 134 films have won Japanese or international awards.

                      Among the films honoured abroad are Kurosawa's "Yojimbo," made
                      in 1961 and "Red Beard" made in 1964, both of which won Mifune
                      the Venice Film Festival Actor's Prize, making him the only actor to
                      have received the prestigious prize twice.

                      Mifune appeared in many foreign films, first as a drunken peasant in
                      the 1961 award-winning Mexican film, "Animas Trujano: El Hombre
                      Importante," and as a warlord in the American television series
                      "Shogun" in 1980.

                      He starred with Alain Delon and Charles Bronson in the
                      Franco-Japanese "Red Sun" in 1972.

                      Although Mifune's name became synonymous with samurai and
                      historical dramas, he also appeared in many films about the plight of
                      modern man in Japan.

                      Mifune established Mifune Productions in 1963, when he also took
                      his only stab at directing in "Gojumannin no Isan" (The Inheritance
                      of 500,000 People), a box-office flop and personally exhausting, he
                      said.