September, 1945. The war has just ended and Japan is in ruins. A young man, twenty five years old, discharged from the defeated Imperial Air Force leaves the rural air base in Kyushu where he had been stationed. What next? Where should he go? Born and raised in Manchuria, he had never lived in Japan. Although Japanese, he was a stranger in an alien land. His parents were dead, he had no relatives he knew about, no home to return to, no one to take him in. Back in middle school he had helped out around his father's studio in china, and as a flier he'd done some aerial photography during the war. Maybe he could find work as a photographer in Tokyo.

Making his way to the big city, he finds it a charred ruin, a vast plain of ashes and crumbling buildings. He finds lodging with an old army buddy, and begins looking for work. Photography is not a trade in demand in this devastated wasteland.

Spring, 1946. From another friend in his military outfit, he hears of an opening for an assistant cameraman at a movie studio. The young man submits an application without much hope; there are hundreds of other applicants.

A month later, he's called to the studio. Ushered into a room for an interview with a panel of judges, he is asked to laugh. "Laugh? What is this? I came for a job."

If he wants to audition, he has to laugh, he is told. Somehow his application has been misdirected, and he has found himself auditioning in the studio's "new faces" talent hunt, one of four thousand applicants.

"I can't just laugh," he replies curtly, beginning to get angry. they're wasting his time and worse, they're treating him like a fool. The interviewers, impatient with his arrogant stubbornness, dismiss him. But one of them, an elderly white-haired gentleman with a mustache, persuades the other judges to call him back - that sort of seething hostility is just what they should be looking for. Next they ask him to play drunk. Another fellow, tall and younger than the others, wearing a floppy hat, has entered the room to watch the audition.

The young man thinks this is getting a little silly. He doesn't want to be an actor; he's here for a real job. But "drunk" is something he knows. There hasn't been much else to do recently but drink.

He knows what it feels like to be drunk and down-and-out, so why not give it a go? He begins to reel and lurch around the room. He's still mad at these guys for making a fool of him, so as long as he's supposed to be drunk, he might as well let them all have it. He shouts and stumbles and launches into an angry tirade. After awhile, feeling a bit sheepish, he eases up, slumps into a chair and glares menacingly at the judges. The judges spend a few moments in whispered discussion. Then they turn to him smiling. "That was just fine - you're hired." He is just one of sixteen male actors hired in the talent hunt. He is shortly afterward given a leading role in his first film, and two pictures later, he's a star.

A romantic daydream? It could only happen in the movies. But it's true. it would make a great movie, but only if they got Toshiro Mifune to star in it. After all, who - other than Mifune himself - could do justice to The Toshiro Mifune Story?

To fill in a few other key details, the studio is Toho, the white-haired gentleman is Kajiro Yamamoto, one of Toho's leading directors, and the man in the floppy hat is Akira Kurosawa. He had been working on an adjoining set, and had been called over by several actors to watch the brash young man audition. He was mightily impressed by what he saw, and thus began one of the most fruitful collaborations between an actor and director in cenema.

Remembering their earliest work together, Kurosawa later wrote of Mifune in his autobiography:

Mifune had a kind of talent I had never encountered before in the Japanese film world. It was, above all, the speed with which he expressed himself that was astounding. The ordinary Japanese actor might need ten feet of film to get across an impression; Mifune needed only three. The speed of his movements was such that he said in a single action what took ordinary actors three separate movements to express. He put forth everything directly and boldly, and his sense of timing was the keenest I had ever seen in a Japanese actor. And yet with all his quickness, he also had surprisingly fine sensibilities.

Between 1948 and 1965, Kurosawa cast Toshiro Mifune in leading roles in all but one of the seventeen films he made in that period. Beginning with Drunken Angel (Yoidore tenshi) in 1948, and continuing through such masterpieces as Rashoman (1950), Seven Samurai (Shichinin no samurai, 1954), I Live in Fear (Ikimono no kiroku, 1955), Throne of Blood (Kumonosu-jo, 1957), The Bad Sleep Well (Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemoru, 1960), Yojimbo (1961), High and Low (Tengoku to jigoku, 1963), and Red Beard (Akahige, 1964), Kurosawa tailored one role after another to the special strengths of his extraordinary star actor. And all the while, Mifune's considerable talents grew and deepened.

The film that launched Toshiro Mifune after that momentous audition in 1946 was not directed by Kurosawa, however. He was first cast as one of the leads in Snow Trail (Ginrei no hate, also known as To the End of the Silver Mountains), an original script written by Kurosawa for his friend, the young director Senkichi Taniguchi. Both Kurosawa and Taniguchi had worked as assistants to Kajiro Yamamoto, and Yamamoto continued to serve as mentor to the two of them, as well as to the powerful new actor whose audition he had overseen.

Snow Trail was an action picture - a sort of Japanese Treasure of the Sierra Madre - about three bank robbers who escape into the Japan Alps. The film was shot largely on location and involved hazardous set-ups along mountain precipices. Mifune modestly claims to have been given the starring role only because he was willing to undertake the most dangerous stunts himself, thereby saving the studio the cost of a stand-in. His second film was a bit part in Yamamoto's dark comedy of postwar Japan, These Foolish Times (Shin baka jidai, 1947).

The Kurosawa-Mifune collaboration began in 1948 with Drunken Angel. Akira Kurosawa was by then already recognized as a director of considerable promise, with six major films to his name. And yet, it was with Drunken Angel that he claims to have first found his real voice and to have placed his own unique stamp on a film for the first time. Kurosawa's authority and control were were already firmly established as he set out to make a movie about the humanism of a doctor struggling against poverty and disease in a Tokyo slum. Cast as the doctor was the veteran actor Takashi Shimura, and Mifune had the rather small role of a young hoodlum whom Shimura tries to cure. But just as he had taken his audition by storm, Mifune overwhelmed Kurosawa's plans for Drunken Angel. As Kurosawa remembers it:

...With the appearance of Toshiro Mifune as the gangster, this was the first picture in which my original idea was totally turned upside down. Shimura's portrayal of the doctor was excellent, but I just couldn't restrain the overpowering force of Mifune's performance. Naturally, as the title indicates, the doctor was supposed to be the film's hero. But what a shame it would have been to stifle Mifune's vitality. He reacts so swiftly to direction, you know: if I say one thing to him, he understands ten. I decided to turn him loose.

As filming progressed, Kurosawa and his scriptwriters were forced to rewrite more and more, making Mifune's character central to the story. Drunken Angel would not be the last film that Mifune would steal.

Kurosawa saw to it that Mifune got a different sort of role for his next picture - a dedicated doctor part of his own in The Quiet Duel - but Mifune's vigorous image as a man of impudence and barely suppressed rage was one that stuck with him right from the audition room. Though he played a number of quiet, refined, gentlemanly sorts through the eary 50's, he made his mark in roles that tapped his wild, exuberant force: Stray Dog (1949), as a cop; Rashomon (1950), as the snarling bandit; Seven Samurai (1954), as Kikuchiyo, the tag-along seventh samurai (which remains his favorite role and from which he can still recite his dialogue); the title role in Miyamoto Musashi (1954, known in America as Samurai; the untamed Matsu in The Rikisha Man (1958); and his own version of Cyrano de Bergerac in Samurai Saga (1959).

Toshiro Mifune also came to epitomize a certain type of actor with deep roots in classical Japanese performance, the tateyaku, the heroic leading man who had stepped onto the stage directly from the pages of epic military romances and samurai mythology. Critic Tadao Sato has written extensively about the tateyaku personality in films and its derivation from the Kabuki stage. Through his descriptions of the Japanese manly ideal as represented by the tateyaku - strongwilled, brave, ascetic, and self-sacrificing - the reader envisions Toshiro Mifune.

In contrast was the nimaime-type, the softer, gentler romantic heroes of domestic love-dramas. Mifune stands firmly in the tateyaku camp, and as a result has played almost no love scenes in his long career. Still, he has managed to invest the tateyaku stereotype with far greater complexity and depth of feeling than any of its more rigid exponents. Or, as Donald Richie puts it, "Mifune always looks as though he would rather sleep with something other than his sword."

In the Kurosawa films of the middle 1950s, Mifune's performances and the scripts that Kurosawa wrote for him, took on a rather Shakespearean weight. As the brash, impulsive Kikuchiyo in Seven Samurai, Mifune never lets the viewer forget the character's tragic origins: not merely an ambitious samurai, he's a peasant youth, orphaned in infancy and now posing as a samurai even though he hates that class' domineering power. As the aged patriarch of I Live in Fear (Mifune at 35 playing a man twice his age), he projects a mind disintegrating with fear of impending nuclear destruction. In Throne of Blood, Kurosawa's brilliant transposition of Macbeth to medieval Japan, Mifune combines the Shakespearean traditions with those of the Japanese military sagas and the Noh stage. In The Lower Depths (Kurosawa's adaptation of Gorky's play of the same name), Mifune weaves together raffish comedy, bombastic swagger, and romantic yearnings in a performance that is unforgettable as much for its subtlety as for its vigor. Finally, in The Bad Sleep Well, and High and Low, Mifune plays modern roles of great psychological complexity: men struggling with conscience and moral outrage, their furious will to action restrained by fear or guile.

As he matured Mifune refined his flair for comedy and gave to certain roles a bemused wisdom, seeming to smile at the memory of the angry young man he once had been. These sardonic characters, such as the vagrant protagonists of Yojimbo (1961) and Sanjuro (1962), are also characteristic of another of his role types, the "good bad guy." As anti-heroes, these men may be thieves or rogues, as in Saga of the Vagabonds (Sengoku guntoden, 1959), The Gambling Samurai (Kunisada Chuji, 1960), or Ambush (Machibuse, 1970), but they know what is right and just. In other films - Red Beard (Akahige, 1964), Rebellion (Joiuchi,1966), Band of Assassins (Shinsen-gumi, 1970) - his roles are men obsessed with a cause. Social misfits some of them, or men resisting the tide of history or politics, all were staunch "samurai," singlemindedly devoting their energy to what they believed to be right.

An affinity to men of might and right has led Mifune naturally to roles as military men, soldiers not only from Japan's historical past but of his own era as well. The most prominent of these is Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the much revered Japanese naval hero, whom Mifune has portrayed in several films, including Storm Over the Pacific (Taiheiyo no arashi, 1960), Midway (1976), and Admiral Yamamoto (Yamamoto Isoroku, 1968). Yet Mifune's own military experience was a far cry from the elite career of the great Japanese admiral. In 1940, fresh out of school in Manchuria, he joined the Imperial Army Airforce:

...There I was, a naive young man just turned twenty, the age when everyone went into the army, called up for active duty with one of those formal conscription notices inscribed on red paper. I left home and family reluctantly, not knowing if I would ever see my parents again and anxious at the thought of going off to kill people. Amid the stifling stench of leather, sweat, grease, and that pungent odor peculiar to men, I and the other bewildered young recruits were stirred up toblood lust. What a nightmare! Shuffled back and forth, first north then south, I lived that desperate soldier's life for six years. These big rough laborer's hands of mine are my unwanted souvenirs of that time.

From Eiga Sutaa jijoden-shu (Autobiographies of Movie Stars)

Mifune's personal military experience, in other words, was hardly heroic. Rather than the great warlords or brilliant officers he portrayed in some of his films, his own memories are closer to the roles he played in certain others: Desperado Outpost (Dokuritsu gurentai, 1959), about a band of outlaw soldiers fed up with the army; Fort Graveyard (Chi to suna, 1964), in which he played a touch sergeant; Hell in the Pacific (1968), where he is a soldier stranded on a desert island; or even his role in Seven Samurai, as the peasant who would be a soldier.

Mifune's experience of the war and his struggle to find a new life afterward have marked many of his performances, his "ordinary man" roles. The desperate young cop in Stray Dog (Nora inu, 1949), the kindly laborer in Downtown (Shitamachi, 1957), the impulsive Matsu in The Rikisha Man (Muho Matsu no issho, 1958), the stevedore foreman in Man Against Man (Otoko tai otoko, 1960), and Tetsu the fisherman in Jakoman and Tetsu (Jakoman to Tetsu, 1949).

Internationally, Toshiro Mifune has had two careers. First, of course, is the reputation he has built for himself around the world in Japanese films. Second are his performances in non-Japanese films. The world was first alerted to the arrival of this charismatic new Japanese film star when Roshomon won the Grand Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1953 and took the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film the following year. Mifune's performance as the wild bandit Tajomaru stunned audiences and critics all over the world, and it was followed soon after by equally powerful appearances in a stream of Kurosawa films that found enthusiastic international audiences and garnered one film award after another. Mifune's films for other Japanese directors--Kenji Mizoguchi's The Life of Oharu (Saikaku ichidai onna, 1952), Hiroshi Inagaki's Miyamoto Musashi (1954) and The Rikisha Man (1958)--also were well received abroad and strengthened Mifune's standing as Japan's preeminent film star. In the 1960s, Mifune's compelling samurai roles in Kurosawa's Yojimbo and Sanjuro, as well as performances featuring brilliant swordplay in other samurai films by Inagaki and Kihachi Okamoto, won him a passionate following among student audiences on college campuses all across America. Yojimbo and Red Beard also won him the Best Actor Award at the Venice Film Festival, and the distinction of being the only actor to have received that prestigious award twice.

Mifune's career in international films began with a reprise, in a sense, of the inebriated routine he performed at his first Toho audition in 1946. The Mexican producer/director Ismael Rodriguez cast him as the drunken Indian peasant in Animas Trujano: El Hombre Importante in 1961. Not knowing Spanish, Mifune had a Mexican actor record his dialogue on tape. He then memorized his lines from listening to the tape, and in shooting the film spoke his entire part in Spanish. The performance is a tour de force.

His first American picture, Grand Prix, made for John Frankenheimer in 1968, provided Mifune with a very different sort of role, that of a wealthy Japanese industrialist who sponsors an auto racing team. The fee Mifune reportedly received was appropriate to the well-heeled character he played and more than double what he'd ever earned for a role in Japan. Since Grand Prix, he has gone on to appear in nine more American and European films. Mifune has acquitted himself with real distinction in a number of his international films. In Hell in the Pacific, directed by John Boorman, Mifune and co-star Lee Marvin generate powerful dramatic tension as two enemy castaways on a deserted Pacific island. In Red Sun, made for Terence Young in 1972, he maintains genuine dignity and authority in the potentially ludicrous circumstances of a samurai-official in the wild West of the 1860s. In Steven Spielberg's 1941, Mifune displayed a talent for parody as an inept submarine captain sent to bombard the California coast. Here he was sending up the soldierly types like Admiral Yamamoto he had so often played, and had no difficulty holding his own against the brilliant American comic John Belushi (who had made something of a career out of his own parodies of Mifune). Finally, the performance in which all of America saw Mifune was that of Toranaga, the title role of James Clavell's Shogun, which when broadcast as a twelve-hour series in 1980 attracted one of the largest television audiences in history.

Toshiro Mifune's career has not been confined to performing. In 1963, he formed his own production company and that year directed his first (and last) film, The Legacy of the 500,000 (Gojumannin no isan). He also starred in it as a war veteran abducted by a fortune hunter to lead him to a cache of gold abandoned by Japanese soldiers in the Philippines. The film is not one that Mifune remembers fondly. He has continued to produce films, however, and has appeared in a dozen of his own productions, most notably Rebellion, which was named Best Film of 1967 in Japan and had a highly successful international run. Mifune Productions has also contributed to some of the international films he has appeared in: for Hell in the Pacific Mifune brought in a Japanese screenwriter, art director, and technical crew; his company also arranged many of the requirements for shooting The Challenge in Japan in 1981. The company, which includes an acting school, is now devoted chiefly to the production of television films and maintains studios not far from Toho's, where Toshiro Mifune underwent that fateful audition 38 years and more than 130 films ago.

Here's an idea some producer should consider. It would make a great movie. Perhaps Kurosawa could direct it and get Mifune to star in it. It's about this young fellow who has just gotten out of the army at the end of World War II and made his way to Tokyo...