Akira Kurosawa

Akira Kurosawa (1910 to 1998) was a Japanese film director and screenwriter whose career, spanning more than five decades and thirty feature films, made him one of the most internationally influential directors in the history of cinema. Kurosawa began directing during the Second World War under the constraints of Japan's wartime film industry and rose to international prominence after the war with Rashomon, whose fractured, multiple-perspective narrative structure won the Golden Lion at the 1951 Venice Film Festival and introduced postwar Japanese cinema to a global audience. His 1954 film Seven Samurai, an epic account of villagers who hire masterless samurai to defend their village from bandits, is widely regarded as one of the most influential films ever made, its structure and imagery echoed in later films across many national cinemas, including American westerns. Kurosawa worked across genres, directing samurai epics, contemporary dramas, and adaptations of Shakespeare and Russian literature, and collaborated repeatedly with the actor Toshiro Mifune across sixteen films. His later career included a period of critical and commercial difficulty in Japan in the 1970s, during which international backing, including from American directors who cited him as an influence, supported some of his largest productions.