Takashi Shimura: The actor Akira Kurosawa trusted most
Alongside Yasujiro Ozu, perhaps one of the most important movie directors from Japan to ever pick up a camera was Akira Kurosawa. Across 30 movies, Kurosawa detailed his prowess as a filmmaker, leading to a reputation as one of the greatest of his generation and in the entire history of cinema.
There’s a startling uniqueness to a Kurosawa movie in its striking visual style and it’s clear from watching a Kurosawa work, that the director himself was involved in each of its production elements. As for the films themselves, the likes of Ikiru, Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, Yojimbo and Ran all arrived as a result of Kurosawa’s brilliances as a director.
Like any filmmaker, though, Kurosawa had his most frequent collaborators and just as Martin Scorsese has Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio, Kurosawa had a handful of actors whom he felt he could trust the most to bring his action, drama and epic historical movies to life on screen.
Naturally, we associate Kurosawa with the legendary Toshiro Mifune, who had played for the director on 16 magnificent occasions, beginning with 1948’s Drunken Angel and on through Rashomon, Seven Samurai and Yojimbo. However, Mifune wasn’t even the actor who starred for Kurosawa the most because that honour went to Takashi Shimura, who appeared in 21 of Kurosawa’s 30 films.
Born back in 1905, Shimura began to establish himself as a reliable actor in the 1930s and things really began to take off just prior to the advent of the Golden Age of Japanese cinema as World War II was drawing to a close. In 1943, Shimura appeared in Kurosawa’s debut movie, Sanshiro Sugata, as the old jujutsu teacher Murai Hansuke, marking the beginning of a longstanding collaboration.
From there, Shimura went on to appear in Kurosawa’s movies No Regrets for Our Youth as a Tokko official, Drunken Angel as a doctor, a veteran detective in Stray Dog, a down-and-out lawyer in Scandal, the woodcutter eyewitness in Rashomon. Then came two appearances in Kurosawa’s best movies – first, Shimura played the lead role of a terminally ill Tokyo bureaucrat in the 1952 drama Ikiru, and two years later, he portrayed the lead samurai, Kambei, in Kurosawa’s masterpiece action film Seven Samurai.
The collaboration between the two men lasted from 1943 until Kagemusha in 1980, which is longer than the working relationship between Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune, with whom Kurosawa is most often associated, which spanned from 1948 until 1965, although the two artists notorious fell out with one another.
So that means that if there was one person that Kurosawa could trust to bring his character to life on screen, then it was Shimura. Beyond working with the legendary director, though, Shimura had shown his talents in a number of other notable Japanese movies. For instance, he frequently offered his services to Kurosawa’s friend Ishiro Honda and his giant monster movies, like the original Godzilla, in which he played Professor Kyohei Yamane.
If Shimura’s achievements with Kurosawa were impressive, then special note ought to go to sound effects engineer Ichiro Minawa, who actually holds the record for working with the director on the most occasions, namely, 22 times, beginning with The Men Who Step on the Tiger’s Tail. However, when it comes to Kurosawa’s most favoured actor, then look no further than Takashi Shimura.
