In the late 1920s, Heigo became a benshi (silent film narrator) for Tokyo theaters showing foreign films and quickly made a name for himself. Heigo was academically gifted, but soon after failing to secure a place in Tokyo's foremost high school, he began to detach himself from the rest of the family, preferring to concentrate on his interest in foreign literature. Some commentators have suggested that this incident would influence Kurosawa's later artistic career, as the director was seldom hesitant to confront unpleasant truths in his work. When the younger brother wanted to look away from the corpses of humans and beasts scattered everywhere, Heigo forbade him to do so, encouraging Akira instead to face his fears by confronting them directly.

In the aftermath of the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923, Heigo took the thirteen-year-old Akira to view the devastation. Īnother major childhood influence was Heigo Kurosawa (1906-1933), Akira's older brother by four years. During this time, the boy also studied calligraphy and Kendo swordsmanship. Tachikawa, whose progressive educational practices ignited in his young pupil first a love of drawing and then an interest in education in general. An important formative influence was his elementary school teacher Mr. He encouraged his children to watch films young Akira viewed his first movies at the age of six. In addition to promoting physical exercise, Isamu Kurosawa was open to Western traditions and considered theatre and motion pictures to have educational merit. Akira was the eighth and youngest child of the moderately wealthy family, with two of his siblings already grown up at the time of his birth and one deceased, leaving Kurosawa to grow up with three sisters and a brother. His father Isamu (1864–1948), a member of a samurai family from Akita Prefecture, worked as the director of the Army's Physical Education Institute's lower secondary school, while his mother Shima (1870–1952) came from a merchant's family living in Osaka. Kurosawa was born on March 23, 1910, in Ōimachi in the Ōmori district of Tokyo. 1.3 Hollywood ambitions to last films (1966–1998).

1.2 Early postwar years to Red Beard (1946–1965).

His career has been honored by many retrospectives, critical studies and biographies in both print and video, and by releases in many consumer media. Posthumously, he was named ' Asian of the Century' in the 'Arts, Literature, and Culture' category by AsianWeek magazine and CNN, cited there as being among the five people who most prominently contributed to the improvement of Asia in the 20th century. In 1990, he accepted the Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement. After the 1960s he became much less prolific even so, his later work-including two of his final films, Kagemusha (1980) and Ran (1985)-continued to receive great acclaim. Kurosawa directed approximately one film per year throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, including a number of highly regarded (and often adapted) films, such as Ikiru (1952), Seven Samurai (1954), Throne of Blood (1957) and Yojimbo (1961). The commercial and critical success of that film opened up Western film markets for the first time to the products of the Japanese film industry, which in turn led to international recognition for other Japanese filmmakers. Rashomon, which premiered in Tokyo, became the surprise winner of the Golden Lion at the 1951 Venice Film Festival. The two men would go on to collaborate on another fifteen films. After the war, the critically acclaimed Drunken Angel (1948), in which Kurosawa cast the then little-known actor Toshiro Mifune in a starring role, cemented the director's reputation as one of the most important young filmmakers in Japan. After years of working on numerous films as an assistant director and scriptwriter, he made his debut as a director during World War II with the popular action film Sanshiro Sugata. Kurosawa entered the Japanese film industry in 1936, following a brief stint as a painter. He is regarded as one of the most important and influential filmmakers in film history.

Academy Award (1990, Lifetime Achievement)Īkira Kurosawa ( Japanese: 黒澤明, Hepburn: Kurosawa Akira, March 23, 1910 – September 6, 1998) was a Japanese filmmaker and painter who directed thirty films in a career spanning over five decades.

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