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AKIRA (ah-KEER-ah)
A
Japanese film director, producer, screenwriter and editor Common
clues: Director
Kurosawa; “Ran” director Kurosawa; “Rashomon”
director Kurosawa; Kurosawa of the cinema Crossword
puzzle frequency:
once a year Frequency
in English language:
86551 / 86800 News: Was
Akira Kurosawa's final film a tribute to his career, or someone
else's? Video: Trailer:
Akira Kurosawa's Ran
Man
is a genius when he is dreaming – Akira
Kurosawa
Akira
Kurosawa (March 23, 1910 – September 6, 1998) was a
Japanese film director, producer, screenwriter and editor.
Regarded as one of the most important and influential filmmakers
in the history of cinema, Kurosawa directed 30 films in a career
spanning 57 years.
Kurosawa
entered the Japanese film industry in 1936, following a brief
stint as a painter. After years of working on numerous films as
an assistant director and scriptwriter, he made his debut as a
director in 1943, during World War II with the popular action
film Sanshiro Sugata (a.k.a. Judo Saga). After the war, the
critically acclaimed Drunken Angel (1948), in which Kurosawa cast
then-unknown actor Toshirō Mifune in a starring role,
cemented the director’s reputation as one of the most
important young filmmakers in Japan. (The two men would go on to
collaborate on another fifteen films.)
Rashomon,
which premiered in Tokyo in August 1950, and which also starred
Mifune, became, on September 10, 1951, the surprise winner of the
Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and was subsequently
released in Europe and North America. The commercial and critical
success of this 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 film artists.
Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, Kurosawa directed
approximately a film a year, including a number of highly
regarded films such as Ikiru (1952), Seven Samurai (1954) and
Yojimbo (1961). After the mid-1960s, he became much less
prolific, but his later work—including his final two epics,
Kagemusha (1980) and Ran (1985)—continued to win awards,
including the Palme d'Or for Kagemusha, though more often abroad
than in Japan.
In
1990, he accepted the Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement.
Posthumously, he was named "Asian of the Century" in
the "Arts, Literature, and Culture" category by
AsianWeek magazine and CNN, cited as "one of the [five]
people who contributed most to the betterment of Asia in the past
100 years".
This
article is licensed under the GNU
Free Documentation License.
It uses material from the Wikipedia
article "Akira_kurosawa".
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