Akira Kurosawa was a Japanese film director and screenwriter. He is one of the most significant & influential filmmakers of all time. In 57 years of film career, he directed 30 films. With the thoughts of samurai epics, Kurosawa redefined the action genre.
Early Life
Director of the directors Akira Kurosawa was born on March 23, 1990, in Tokyo, Japan. His father Isamu Kurosawa worked as the director of the Army’s Physical Education. Akira was the youngest child amongst eight siblings. At the age of six encouraged by his father young Akira viewed his first movie. Before entering film industry he wanted to be a painter. After working on many films as an assistant director & scriptwriter he made his debut with the action film Sanshiro Sugata. After world war II, by making Drunken Angel Kurosawa reputed as one of the most important young filmmakers in Japan.
Career
After working in a wide range of genres, Kurosawa made his international breakthrough film Rashomon in 1950. It won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival, and first revealed the richness of Japanese cinema to the West.
The next few years saw the low-key, touching Ikiru (1952) (Living), the epic Seven Samurai (1954), the barbaric, riveting Shakespeare adaptation Throne of Blood (1957), and a fun pair of samurai comedies Yojimbo (1961) and Sanjuro (1962).
After a lean period in the late 1960s and early 1970s, though, Kurosawa attempted suicide. He survived, and made a small, personal, low-budget picture with Dodes’ka-den (1970), a larger-scale Russian co-production Dersu Uzala (1975) and, with the help of admirers Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, the samurai tale Kagemusha (1980), which Kurosawa described as a dry run for Ran (1985), an epic adaptation of Shakespeare’s “King Lear.” He continued to work into his eighties with the more personal Dreams (1990), Rhapsody in August (1991) and Maadadayo (1993).
Kurosawa‘s films have always been more popular in the West than in his native Japan, where critics have viewed his adaptations of Western genres and authors (William Shakespeare, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Maxim Gorky and Evan Hunter) with suspicion – but he’s revered by American and European film-makers, who remade Rashomon (1950) as The Outrage (1964), Seven Samurai (1954), as The Magnificent Seven (1960), Yojimbo (1961), as Fistful of Dollars (1964) and The Hidden Fortress (1958), as Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (1977).