A Japanese film director, producer, screenwriter and editor. Regarded as one of the most important and influential filmmakers in the history of cinema, he 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, with the popular action film Sanshiro Sugata (aka Judo Saga). After the war, the critically acclaimed Drunken Angel (1948), in which he cast then-unknown actor Toshirō Mifune in a starring role, cemented his reputation as one of the most important young filmmakers in Japan. The two men went on to collaborate on another 15 films. Rashomon, which premiered in 1950, and which also starred Mifune, was also released in Europe and North America, and 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.