- published: 30 Mar 2013
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Takashi Shimura (志村 喬, Shimura Takashi?, March 12, 1905 – February 11, 1982) was a Japanese actor. He was born in Ikuno, Hyogo, Japan. His debut as actor was the film Akanishi Kakita (Capricious Young Man, 1936) and cast in the Kenji Mizoguchi's film Osaka Elegy (1936).
In company with Toshirō Mifune, Shimura is the actor who is most closely associated with Akira Kurosawa. Shimura appeared in 21 of Kurosawa's 30 films. His roles include the doctor in Drunken Angel (1948), the veteran detective in Stray Dog (1949), the flawed lawyer in Scandal (1950), the woodcutter in Rashomon (1950), the mortally ill bureaucrat in Ikiru (1952), and the lead samurai Kambei in Seven Samurai (1954).
In fact, Kurosawa's cinematic collaboration with Shimura, from 1943 to 1980, started earlier and lasted longer than his work with Mifune (1948–65). Shimura appeared in the director's debut film Sanshiro Sugata (1943), and the last film of Kurosawa's in which he acted was Kagemusha (1980), for which Kurosawa specifically wrote a part for Shimura. However, the scene was cut from the western release, and so many did not know that he had been part of the film. The DVD release of the film by The Criterion Collection restored Shimura's footage.
Akira Kurosawa (黒澤 明, Kurosawa Akira?, March 23, 1910 – September 6, 1998) was a Japanese film director, screenwriter, producer, and editor. Regarded as one of the most important and influential filmmakers in the history of cinema, Kurosawa directed 30 films in a career spanning 57 years.
Kurosawa entered the Japanese film industry in 1936, following a brief stint as a painter. After years of working on numerous films as an assistant director and scriptwriter, he made his debut as a director in 1943, during World War II with the popular action film Sanshiro Sugata (a.k.a. Judo Saga). After the war, the critically acclaimed Drunken Angel (1948), in which Kurosawa cast then-unknown actor Toshirō Mifune in a starring role, cemented the director's reputation as one of the most important young filmmakers in Japan. The two men would go on to collaborate on another 15 films.
Rashomon, which premiered in Tokyo in August 1950, and which also starred Mifune, became, on September 10, 1951, the surprise winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and was subsequently released in Europe and North America. The commercial and critical success of this film opened up Western film markets for the first time to the products of the Japanese film industry, which in turn led to international recognition for other Japanese filmmakers. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, Kurosawa directed approximately a film a year, including a number of highly regarded films such as Ikiru (1952), Seven Samurai (1954) and Yojimbo (1961). After the mid-1960s, he became much less prolific, but his later work—including his final two epics, Kagemusha (1980) and Ran (1985)—continued to win awards, including the Palme d'Or for Kagemusha, though more often abroad than in Japan.