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Akira Kurosawa was born in Tokyo, Japan in the Ōmori district. His father worked as the director of the Army’s Physical Education Institute’s lower secondary school, while his mother Shima came from a merchant family living in Osaka. Akira was the eighth and youngest child of the moderately wealthy family, with the oldest two already grown up and one having died, leaving Kurosawa to grow up with three sisters and one brother. -
In 1930, the 20-year-old Akira was called up for military conscription, but thanks to a sympathetic army doctor he was deemed physically unfit to serve. This would have a major impact on Kurosawa’s career ten years later, since due to having been labelled unfit to serve, he would not be drafted to fight in World War II.
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After secondary school, Kurosawa attended an art school and studied painting in the Western style. His work received a number of awards and prizes, but he gave up his ambition to become a painter and instead began work in the film industry as an assistant director to Kajiro Yamamoto in the PCL cinema studio.
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In 1943 Kurosawa was promoted to director and made his first feature film, Sanshiro Sugata, from his own scenario; this story of Japanese judo masters of the 1880s scored a great popular success. -
In 1944 he made his second film, Ichiban utsukushiku (The Most Beautiful), a story about girls at work in an arsenal. Immediately thereafter, he married the actress who had played the leading part in the picture, Yaguchi Yoko; they had two children, a son and a daughter. -
In August 1945, when Japan offered to surrender in World War II, he was shooting his picture Tora no o fumu otokotachi (They Who Step on the Tiger’s Tail), a parody of a well-known Kabuki drama. The Allied occupation forces, however, prohibited the release of most films dealing with Japan’s feudal past, and this outstanding comedy was not distributed until 1952. -
Kurosawa’s Rashomon was shown at the Venice Film Festival in 1951 and was awarded the Grand Prix. It also won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film. This was the first time a Japanese film had won such high international acclaim. -
Ikiru is regarded by many critics as one of the finest works in the history of the cinema. In this film, which abounds in strong moral messages, Kurosawa depicts in an extremely realistic manner the collapse of the family system, as well as the hypocritical aspects of officials in postwar Japanese society. The picture was an outstanding document of the life and the spiritual situation of Japanese people, who were then beginning to recover from the desperation caused by defeat in the war. -
In 1960 Kurosawa set up Kurosawa Productions, of which he became president, and began to produce his own works. As producer, however, he was continually embarrassed by economic difficulties. Throughout the 1960s, Kurosawa made a number of entertainment films, mainly with samurai as leading characters.
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The film, The Bad Sleep Well based on a script by Kurosawa’s nephew Mike Inoue. The theme of the film proved very topical, as while the film was in production, mass demonstrations were held against a new US-Japanese treaty, which was seen by many to threaten the country’s young democracy by giving too much power to the hands of corporations and individual politicians. -
Japanese cinema fell into an economic depression, and Kurosawa’s plans were found by film companies to be too expensive. Kurosawa attempted to work with Hollywood producers, but each of the projects ended in failure. At the Kyōto studio in 1968, for 20th Century Fox, he started shooting Tora! Tora! Tora!, a war film dealing with the air attack on Pearl Harbor. The work progressed slowly; however, the producer dismissed Kurosawa and replaced him with another director.
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Kurosawa managed to present another of his films, Dodesukaden. His first work in color, a comedy of poor people living in slums, it recaptured much of the poignancy of his best works but failed financially. After an attempted suicide, Kurosawa filmed Dersu Uzala (1975) in Siberia at the invitation of the Soviet government. This story of a Siberian hermit won wide acclaim. -
Kagemusha (“The Shadow Warrior”), released in 1980, was the director’s first samurai film in 14 years. It concerns a petty thief who is chosen to impersonate a powerful feudal lord killed in battle. This film was notable for its powerful battle scenes. -
Kurosawa’s next film, Ran (1985; “Chaos”), was an even more successful samurai epic. An adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear set in 16th-century Japan, the film uses sons instead of daughters as the aging monarch’s ungrateful children. Ran was acclaimed as one of Kurosawa’s greatest films in the grandeur of its imagery, the intellectual depth of its screen adaptation, and the intensity of its dramatic performances. -
Two months before the premiere of Dreams and three days after his 80th birthday, the director attended the 62nd Academy Awards in Los Angeles on March 26, 1990, where he received an Honorary Award “for cinematic accomplishments that have inspired, delighted, enriched and entertained worldwide audiences and influenced filmmakers throughout the world”. -
Dreams, which featured the American filmmaker Martin Scorsese as Vincent van Gogh, premiered at Cannes on May 11, 1990 to a polite but muted reception, which was repeated when the film was released around the world. Since its release and especially throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Dreams has been one of Kurosawa’s most often watched works, largely thanks to its availability on home video at a time when Kurosawa’s other films were not similarly easily found. -
Unfortunately, while Kurosawa was putting in the finishing touches on The Sea is Watching at home in 1995, the now 85-year-old director one day slipped and ended up breaking the base of his spine. Following the accident, he would be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life, thus putting an end to any hopes of him directing another film again.
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Following Kurosawa’s accident in 1995 which left him wheelchair bound, his health began to deteriorate. By the spring of 1998, the director was largely confined to bed in his home at Setagaya in Tokyo. At the age of 88, Kurosawa passed away after a stroke.