Actor: Toshiro Mifune
Toshiro Mifune made sixteen films with Akira Kurosawa and the partnership is among the closest between an actor and a director in cinema. He arrived at Toho by accident, having applied for a camera assistant job, and was cast on the strength of an audition he reportedly performed in a fury.
The physicality is the thing. In Seven Samurai he scratches, howls and moves like an animal, and the performance works because Takashi Shimura’s stillness is in the same frame. Yojimbo gives him the opposite register, all calculation and shoulder rolls, and that character became the template for Leone’s Man with No Name.
Rashomon, Throne of Blood, The Hidden Fortress and High and Low fill out a decade with no equal in either man’s career.
The partnership ended after Red Beard and neither fully recovered. Mifune worked internationally afterward, including in Hell in the Pacific and Shogun, without finding a director who used him as well.
