Profile
黒澤明（1910-1998）は東京都出身の映画監督・脚本家。『羅生門』『七人の侍』『生きる』などを手がけ、世界中の映画作家に影響を与えた「世界のクロサワ」。
Akira Kurosawa was born on March 23, 1910, in Ōimachi, Ebara District, Tokyo Prefecture (now Shinagawa Ward, Tokyo), the youngest of eight children. His father, Isamu, was a physical education instructor trained at the Army’s Toyama School and came from a family of former Aizu-domain samurai. Unusually for a military man of his era, Isamu loved cinema and often took young Akira to the movies. Akira’s much older brother, Heigo, worked as a benshi — a live narrator who explained silent films to audiences — and introduced him to both cinema and literature; when the arrival of talking pictures made the benshi profession obsolete, Heigo took his own life in 1933, a loss that affected Kurosawa deeply. As a young man Kurosawa aspired to be a painter, studying Western-style art on his own after finishing secondary school and taking part in the proletarian art movement, but by his mid-twenties he had not found the confidence to make a living from painting.
In 1936, Kurosawa learned that the film company P.C.L. (a predecessor of Toho) was recruiting assistant directors, applied with a written essay, and was accepted. There he trained under director Kajiro Yamamoto, who became his lifelong mentor and taught him both screenwriting and on-set direction. Kurosawa made his directorial debut in 1943 with Sanshiro Sugata, about a young martial arts student. His 1950 film Rashomon won the Golden Lion at the 1951 Venice International Film Festival, a turning point that introduced Japanese cinema to the world. He went on to release Ikiru (1952), Seven Samurai (1954), Yojimbo (1961), and Red Beard (1965) in quick succession, forming, together with actor Toshiro Mifune, what is often considered the golden age of Japanese cinema. His dynamic camerawork, meticulous scripts, and stories that portrayed human weakness and dignity side by side went on to deeply influence filmmakers worldwide, including George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, and Sergio Leone.
After Red Beard, Kurosawa’s perfectionism drove up production costs, making it increasingly difficult to secure funding in Japan. When the 1970 international co-production Dodesukaden failed at the box office, Kurosawa attempted suicide the following year, 1971 — one of the darkest periods of his life. Yet his passion for filmmaking never faded: he made a comeback with the Soviet co-production Dersu Uzala (1975), which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. In 1980, Kagemusha, financed in part with backing arranged by Lucas and Coppola, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and his 1985 epic Ran received similarly high international acclaim. In 1990, at the 62nd Academy Awards, Kurosawa received an Honorary Academy Award, presented by Lucas and Spielberg. He continued directing until the very end of his life, making Dreams that same year, Rhapsody in August in 1991, and his final film, Madadayo, in 1993. He died of a stroke on September 6, 1998, at his home in Seijo, Setagaya, Tokyo, at the age of 88. Known worldwide as “World’s Kurosawa” (世界のクロサワ), his body of work continues to shape filmmakers and audiences across every national border.