Thinkers Timeline

Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998) was a Japanese film director, screenwriter, and editor whose thirty completed feature films include some of the most influential works in the history of cinema. He was born in Tokyo, the youngest of seven children in a family descended from samurai. His older brother Heigo, a narrator for silent films, took him to see European and American movies and introduced him to Western literature; Heigo's suicide in 1933 marked Kurosawa deeply. Kurosawa had initially wanted to be a painter and studied Western art before entering the film industry as an assistant director in 1936. He learned his craft under the veteran director Kajiro Yamamoto and directed his first film in 1943, during the Second World War. After the war he emerged as a major figure in the revival of Japanese cinema. His 1950 film Rashomon won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, bringing Japanese cinema to wide international attention for the first time. Over the following four decades he directed Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, The Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo, Ikiru, High and Low, Ran, and many other films, adapting Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, and Japanese sources, and producing original works set in both historical and contemporary Japan. He faced career setbacks in the 1970s, including a suicide attempt in 1971, but continued working into his late eighties. He was awarded an honorary Oscar in 1990 and died in 1998 at eighty-eight.