context: movies > directors > Kurosawa

Akira Kurosawa and his actors

Kurosawa established a roster of favourite actors after the war, so you see the same faces in film after film. Toshiro Mifune's first starring role was in what is often considered the first genuine Kurosawa, Drunken Angel in 1948. He went on to star in nearly all his films for many years to come, until they fell out in the mid-'60s.

Takashi Shimura starred in several, not least as the senior samurai in Seven Samurai, a figure of good-humoured dignity, and in the lead role in Ikiru as a dying civil servant.

sideways: actors

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