Toshirō Mifune was born in Qingdao, China, to Japanese parents, and grew up in the Chinese city of Dalian with his parents and two siblings.
Although the young Mifune spent the first 19 years of his life in China, as a Japanese citizen, he was drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army, where he served in the Air Service in an Aerial Photography (Ko-type) unit in China during the Second Sino-Japanese War.
He was repatriated to Japan in 1946, and became an actor who appeared in almost 170 feature films. He is best known for his collaborations with filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, in films such as Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, and Yojimbo. He is also popular for portraying Musashi Miyamoto in Hiroshi Inagaki’s Samurai Trilogy.
He died on December 24th, 1997, in Tokyo, Japan. He is known to have often drawn from his experience in the war to portray and inspire emotion in his acting, himself admitting that anger was most easily tapped into when thinking about the war.
