10 War Movie Actors Who Were Actually There
4. Toshiro Mifune
Toshiro Mifune, arguably the greatest Japanese actor of all time, began his acting career following Japan's defeat in the Second World War, quickly developing one of the medium's most formidable partnerships with director Akira Kurosawa. Mifune delivered legendary performances across Kurosawa's peerless filmography, starting with Drunken Angel in 1948 and peaking with samurai dramas Throne of Blood, Seven Samurai, and Yojimbo in the subsequent years.
Before he was an actor, however, Mifune was drafted into the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces upon the country's entry into WWII, where he served as an aerial photographer. Mifune's wartime experience lasted the full breadth of Japan's engagement in the conflict, commencing in 1940 and concluding only with the country's surrender after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
More than just conducting aerial reconnaissance, Mifune bore witness to the Japanese Air Service's brutal kamikaze tactics firsthand as the war drew to its closing stages, spending time with selected pilots before they embarked on their one-way trips to meet Allied targets in the Pacific. This experience is said to have had a profound impact on Mifune, who claimed to have told the pilots not to venerate Emperor Hirohito as they met their end, but to cry out for their mothers instead.
Despite his harrowing experience in the war, Mifune took several WWII assignments across his career, including Japanese-directed films like Eagle of the Pacific and Attack Squadron, both of which saw the actor play fighter pilots. Ironically, despite most of Mifune's U.S.-directed films failing to match the standard set by his Japanese works, it was John Boorman's Hell in the Pacific that perhaps best translated the raw emotional force of Mifune's talent to the genre - a film that cast him opposite fellow Pacific War veteran Lee Marvin as a pair of pilots stranded on a remote island, and who have to overcome their differences in order to survive.
Hell in the Pacific is still relatively underseen compared to most war movies of the period, but it is a truly fascinating picture, made all the more compelling by Marvin and Mifune's wartime experiences.