Akira Kurosawa, the "Emperor of Japanese film" died yesterday of a stroke at his home in Tokyo. He was 88. A cosmopolitan film maker who put his country's cinema on the map, he leaped to international fame in 1951 with Rashomon. This was a mediaeval murder tale which broke new cinematic ground by using different narratives to tell the same story from four points of view.
Several of Kurosawa's most famous films were based on the works of Shakespeare and other Western classics, which were then reset in Japan. The only director to have won two Oscars for best foreign film, Kurosawa in 1990 received a lifetime achievement award from the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Kurosawa's career was closely tied to that of the actor Toshiro Mifune, who died last December. He had starred as the bandit in Rashomon. The film won the Grand Prix at the Venice International Film Festival - the first international recognition given to a Japanese director - and a 1952 Oscar for best foreign film.
His 1954 film, The Seven Samurai, won widespread acclaim and became the model for the Hollywood western, The Magnificent Seven.
His 1991 film, Rhapsody in August, with Richard Gere as a second-generation American-Japanese who visits his Japanese relatives in Hiroshima and apologises for the US atomic bombing in August 1945, stirred controversy abroad for failing to address Japan's war guilt.
In the late 1960s, Kurosawa had became the centre of another contentious debate when he joined American producer, Elmo Williams, to work on Tora! Tora! Tora! about the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. He left after a bitter row about different approaches to the film.
A tall, thick-set man known for his trademark cap and dark sunglasses, Kurosawa was born in Tokyo on March 23rd, 1910, the youngest of eight children of a career soldier, descended from an old samurai clan in northern Akita. During high school, he refused to undergo military training. He spent his spare time reading Western writers and was particularly fascinated by Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.
In 1936, an accomplished but unemployed painter, he successfully applied for a position as an assistant film director under the late Kajiro Yamamoto, at that time a dominant figure in the industry.
Kurosawa was awarded the Grand Prix at the Moscow Film Festival and his second Oscar in 1976 for Dersu Uzala, which was produced by the Soviet Mosfilm Studio. Kagemusha (The Shadow Warrior) was a co-winner of the Grand Prix at the 1980 Cannes Film Festival.
Yesterday, tributes from politicians and cultural figures flowed in on news of his death. The French President, Mr Jacques Chirac, a lifelong lover of Japanese culture, said his work represented "major milestones in the history of international cinema".
The US film-maker, Stephen Spielberg, said Kurosawa "was a celluloid painter. . . as close to an impressionist as you can be on film". "More than that, I think he was the pictorial Shakespeare of our time."
The former French culture minister, Mr Jack Lang, said Kurosawa "will remain, thanks to his brilliant and powerful work, an international cinema treasure".