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Akira Kurosawa "There is something that might be called cinematic beauty. It can only be expressed in a film, and it must be present for that film to be a moving work. When it is very well expressed, one experiences a particularly deep emotion while watching that film. I believe that it is this quality that draws people to come and see a film, and that it is the hope of attaining this quality that inspires the director to make the film in the first place.", also 黒沢 明 in Shinjitai) (March 23, 1910 – September 6, 1998) was a prominent Japanese film director, film producer, and screenwriter.

Kurosawa is perhaps Japan's best-known filmmaker. His films have greatly influenced a whole generation of filmmakers worldwide. Few filmmakers have had a career so long or so acclaimed. His first credited film () in 1993. His many awards include the Legion d'Honneur and an Oscar for Lifetime Achievement.

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Kurosawa was born March 23, 1910, in Omori, Tokyo, the youngest of seven children. He trained as a painter and began work in the film industry as an assistant director to Kajiro Yamamoto in 1936. He made his directorial debut in 1943 with . His first few films were made under the watchful eye of the wartime Japanese government and sometimes contained nationalistic themes. For instance, has been held to be explicitly anti-American in the way that it portrays Japanese judo as superior to western (American) boxing. His first post-war film , by contrast, is critical of the old Japanese regime and is about the wife of a left-wing dissident arrested for his political leanings. Kurosawa made several more films which deal with contemporary Japan, most notably , which deals with a Japanese bureaucrat who discovers that he is suffering from cancer but eventually steps out of depression and struggles against bureacratic inertia to leave his small contribution to the world in the form of a small community park before he dies.

Kurosawa had a distinctive cinematic technique, which he had developed by the 1950s, and which gave his films a unique look. He liked using telephoto lenses for the way they flattened the frame and also because he believed that placing cameras farther away from his actors produced better performances. He also liked using multiple cameras, which allowed him to shoot an action from different angles. Another Kurosawa trademark was the use of weather elements to . Kurosawa also liked using left-to-right frame wipes as a transition device.

He was known as "Tenno", literally "Emperor", for his dictatorial directing . He was a perfectionist who spent enormous amounts of time and effort to achieve the desired visual effects. In , he dyed the rain water black with calligraphy ink in order to achieve the effect of heavy rain, and ended up using up the entire local water supply of the location area in creating the rainstorm. In , in the final scene in which Mifune is shot by arrows, Kurosawa used real arrows shot by expert archers from a short range, landing within centimetres of Mifune's . Other stories include demanding a stream be made to run in the opposite direction in order to get a better visual effect, and having the roof of a house removed, later to be replaced, because he felt the roof's presence to be unattractive in a short sequence filmed from a train.

A notable feature of Kurosawa's films is the breadth of his artistic influences. Some of his plots are adaptations of William Shakespeare's works. was inspired by the detective novels of Georges Simenon. The American film director John Ford also had a large influence on his work.

Despite criticism by some Japanese critics that Kurosawa was "too Western", he was deeply influenced by Japanese culture as well, including the Kabuki and Noh theaters and the jidaigeki (period drama) genre of Japanese cinema.

Kurosawa's films had a huge influence on world cinema. Most explicitly, not only helped open Japanese cinema to the world but virtually entered the English language as a term for fractured, inconsistent narratives as well as influencing other works, including episodes of television series and many motion pictures.

During his most productive period, from the late 40s to the mid-60s, Kurosawa often worked with the same group of collaborators. Fumio Hayasaka composed music for seven of his films; notably were co-written with Hideo Oguni. Yoshiro Muraki was Kurosawa's production designer or art director for most of his films after . Kurosawa also liked recycling the same group of actors, especially Takashi Shimura and Toshiro Mifune. His collaboration with the latter is one of the greatest director-actor combinations in cinema history. It began with 1948's

Red Beard marked a turning point in Kurosawa's career in more ways than one. In addition to being his last film with Mifune, it was his last in black-and-white. It was also his last as a major director within the Japanese studio system making roughly a film a year. Kurosawa was signed to direct a Hollywood project, ; but 20th Century Fox replaced him with Kinji Fukasaku before it was completed. His next few films were a lot harder to finance and were made at intervals of five years. The first, , about a group of poor people living around a rubbish dump, was not a success.

After an attempted suicide, Kurosawa went on to make several more films although arranging domestic financing was highly difficult despite his international reputation. , made in the Soviet Union and set in Siberia in the early 20th century, was the only Kurosawa film made outside Japan and not in Japanese. It is about the friendship of a Russian explorer and a nomadic hunter. It won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. , financed with the help of the director's most famous admirers, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, is the story of a man who is the double of a medieval Japanese lord and takes over his identity. Most important was , Kurosawa's version of King Lear set in medieval Japan. It was the great project of Kurosawa's late career, and he spent a decade planning it and trying to obtain funding, which he was finally able to do with the help of the French producer Serge Silberman. The film was a phenomenal international success and is generally considered Kurosawa's last masterpiece.

Kurosawa made three more films during the 1990s which were more personal than his earlier works. is about a retired teacher and his former students. Kurosawa died on September 6, 1998, in Setagaya, Tokyo.

Kurosawa was a notoriously lavish gourmet, and spent huge quantities of money on film sets providing an uneatably large quantity and quality of delicacies, especially meat, for the cast and crew.

Kurosawa is mentioned in the Barenaked Ladies song One Week: "Like Kurosawa, I make mad films. K, I don't make films. But if I did, they'd have a samurai."

"Maxim Munzuk as Dersu Uzala (left) and Yury Solomin as Vladimir Arsenyev (right) in the 1975 film Dersu Uzala."