Full Name: Akira Kurosawa. Profession: Film Director, Screenwriter, and Producer. Nationality: Japanese. Born: March 23, 1910. Birthplace: Ōmori District, Shinagawa, Tokyo, Japan. Generation: Greatest Generation (1901–1927). Chinese Zodiac: Metal Dog. Zodiac Sign: Aries. Age in 2026: 116 (deceased). Marital Status: Widowed; married actress Yoko Yaguchi on May 21, 1945, until her death in 1985. Children: Two—son Hisao Kurosawa (film producer) and daughter Kazuko Kurosawa (costume designer). Cause of Death: Stroke, September 6, 1998, Tokyo, Japan. Description: Akira Kurosawa was the eighth and youngest child born to a moderately wealthy Tokyo family with traceable samurai lineage stretching back to the 11th century; his father Isamu, a former army officer turned athletics instructor, was a disciplinarian steeped in Bushido yet unusually open to Western culture, regularly taking young Akira to theatres and cinemas from the age of six, while his mother, Shima, daughter of an Osaka merchant family, impressed him with her quiet strength and iron will; from his earliest school years Kurosawa showed no interest in mathematics or science but excelled in art and literature, studying calligraphy and kendo under his father's guidance and falling deeply under the influence of his progressive elementary teacher. Mr. Tachikawa, who awakened in him a love of drawing and broad creative thinking; his older brother Heigo, a sardonic and intellectually brilliant figure, became his closest companion during adolescence and introduced him to the full range of Tokyo's cultural life—foreign films, theatre, circus performances—while also guiding him toward the left-wing Proletarian Artists' League, where Kurosawa exhibited his paintings; the tragic suicide of Heigo in 1933 shattered Kurosawa deeply but also galvanized him, making him, as he later wrote, "impatient with my own aimlessness," and ultimately steering him away from painting—a career in which he could not earn a living—and toward cinema; in 1935 he spotted a newspaper advertisement for assistant director positions at the newly founded Photo Chemical Laboratory (PCL) studio, submitted a famously bold test essay critiquing the fundamental deficiencies of Japanese film, and was hired; legendary director Kajirō Yamamoto immediately recognized his exceptional talent and promoted him within a year directly from third assistant director to chief assistant director, trusting him with tasks spanning set construction, script polishing, location scouting, lighting, editing, dubbing, and second-unit directing; after seven years of intensive apprenticeship, Kurosawa made his directorial debut in 1943 with Sanshiro Sugata, a martial arts drama that established his confident, kinetic visual style; his 1950 masterpiece Rashomon—a daring investigation of subjective truth told through contradictory accounts of a single crime—won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and an Honorary Academy Award, single-handedly introducing Japanese cinema to the Western world and announcing Kurosawa as a revolutionary force in global filmmaking; his 1952 drama Ikiru, inspired by Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, told the story of a dying Tokyo bureaucrat searching for meaning and is widely considered one of cinema's most profound meditations on mortality and human purpose. the 1954 epic Seven Samurai—depicting a group of wandering warriors who defend a helpless village against bandits—became the template for the ensemble action film, pioneered the use of slow-motion in action sequences, won the Silver Lion at Venice, and is routinely cited among the greatest films ever made, inspiring direct remakes including The Magnificent Seven (1960) and influencing countless action films. worldwide; Throne of Blood (1957), his chilling transposition of Shakespeare's Macbeth into feudal Japan, and Yojimbo (1961), a darkly comic tale of a masterless samurai manipulating two rival criminal gangs into mutual destruction, further cemented his reputation as a filmmaker of unmatched technical and narrative mastery. The Hidden Fortress (1958) directly inspired George Lucas's structural approach to Star Wars (1977), with Lucas openly crediting Kurosawa as a foundational influence; his late-career epic Kagemusha (1980) won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, with production support famously provided by both Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola after Japanese studios refused to fund it, while Ran (1985), his towering adaptation of King Lear set amid warring feudal lords, earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Director and is regarded as one of cinema's greatest visual and dramatic achievements; in 1990 Kurosawa received the Academy Honorary Award for Lifetime Achievement, a recognition of his unparalleled contribution to the art of cinema across six decades; across his career of 30 feature films, he demonstrated a bold, dynamic visual style — characterized by the use of telephoto lenses to compress space, extreme weather as dramatic metaphor, innovative wipe edits, and precisely choreographed ensemble movement — while consistently exploring humanist themes of individual dignity, moral responsibility, the cost of violence, and the search for meaning in an indifferent world; directors including Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Ingmar Bergman, Francis Ford Coppola, Sidney Lumet, Robert Altman, and Sam Peckinpah have all cited him as a supreme influence; he received the 1994 Kyoto Prize in Creative Arts and Moral Sciences, Japan's most prestigious cultural honor, and was described by the prize committee as standing "at the pinnacle of 20th-century cinematography"; he published his autobiography Something Like an Autobiography in 1982, a work as cinematic in structure as any of his films; he died of a stroke on September 6, 1998, in his home in Setagaya, Tokyo, at the age of 88, leaving behind a body of work that fundamentally transformed the language of world cinema.