Takashi Shimura (Rashomon) Rashomon
Takashi Shimura was forty-five when he played the woodcutter in Rashomon. He had been working with Kurosawa since Sanshiro Sugata in 1943 -- five years before Toshiro Mifune entered the picture -- and would appear in twenty-one of Kurosawa's thirty films, making him the director's longest-serving collaborator.
His collaboration with Kurosawa started earlier and lasted longer than Mifune's
Shimura is often overshadowed by Mifune in discussions of Kurosawa's stock company, but the numbers tell a different story. Shimura appeared in twenty-one Kurosawa films spanning from 1943 (Sanshiro Sugata) to 1980 (Kagemusha). Mifune's run was sixteen films from 1948 to 1965. Shimura's range for Kurosawa was broader: the doctor in Drunken Angel (1948), the veteran detective in Stray Dog (1949), the flawed lawyer in Scandal (1950), the woodcutter in Rashomon, the mortally ill bureaucrat in Ikiru (1952), and the lead samurai Kambei in Seven Samurai (1954). (wikipedia)
In Rashomon, he provides the emotional anchor the film needs to work
The woodcutter is the character the audience spends the most time with at the Rashomon gate, and he carries the film's emotional weight in a way that the more explosive performances around him cannot. His quiet dignity collapses incrementally as the commoner presses him -- from impartial witness to reluctant storyteller to exposed thief -- and that collapse is what makes the final act of adopting the baby register as genuine rather than sentimental.
Shimura's "affecting portrayal of the woodcutter provides emotional weight, allowing viewers to believe in his redemptive act despite his unreliability as a narrator." — Brian Eggert, Deep Focus Review
The performance is a masterclass in restraint. While Mifune and Kyo deliver expressionistic, silent-film-scale performances, Shimura works at a naturalistic register that grounds the frame story. The contrast is deliberate: the narrated testimonies are theatrical because their tellers are performing for the court; the gate story is quieter because the characters have no audience to impress except each other.
He came from a samurai family and was arrested during the war
Shimura was born Shoji Shimazaki in Ikuno, Hyogo Prefecture, in 1905. His grandfather had fought in the 1868 Battle of Toba-Fushimi. He founded an amateur theatrical group called Shichigatsu-za in 1928 and transitioned to film in the 1930s, with an early substantial role in Mizoguchi Kenji's Osaka Elegy (1936). During World War II, he was briefly arrested by the Japanese secret police for earlier associations with left-wing theater. (wikipedia)
The Criterion edition preserves his own account of working with Kurosawa
The Criterion Blu-ray of Rashomon includes a sixteen-minute interview with Shimura discussing his long collaboration with Kurosawa. The interview is one of the few primary sources in which a Kurosawa actor describes the working relationship from the performer's perspective. (highdefdigest)
He appeared in over two hundred films across five decades
Shimura's career extended far beyond Kurosawa. He appeared in over two hundred films between 1934 and 1981, including the lead role of Professor Kyohei Yamane in the original Godzilla (1954). He was twice nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Actor, won the Mainichi Film Award for Best Actor in 1950 for Stray Dog, and received the Medal with Purple Ribbon in 1974 and the Order of the Rising Sun in 1980. He died of emphysema on February 11, 1982, at age seventy-six. His effects were donated to the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. (wikipedia)