< PreviousI get to disappear for a moment and take some respite. But I’m a dog with my homework, and I’ll read the scripts over again. For Kin, I did my research on the gangland stuff in Dublin, and made a music playlist that suits that role and story. That’s the process. More research means less work when I get on set. It means that it’s time to play. How did your role in Peaky Blinders come about? It started because of my work in Butterfly [a 2018 series], and I shared a WhatsApp group with the director Anthony Byrne, who was working on Peaky Blinders. I texted him saying, “Congratulations on the gig — give me a f***in’ part”, and he said he already had a character in mind for me. I was on a list of one, apparently. I like those odds. Besides, the only thing better than working with someone you admire is being invited back to work with them again. And I was fortunate to be reunited with Anthony. You’re set to have a bigger role in the coming series. How do you deal with pressure? I don’t. There is none. Whether I think something is going right or wrong, I often follow the path of least resistance. Like Bruce Lee said, “Be formless, shapeless, like water”. Don’t impose yourself too much. This allows for more freedom and flexibility... But it’s always important to think about where you’re heading. Just don’t worry about how long it takes you, or if you get diverted on the way. What changes when you become a father? I remember when I had my first child. I was at a bar in Dublin speaking to my dad. I asked him what it meant being a father, and he told me it was being vulnerable. That always stayed with me, and I didn’t grasp his words until I saw my child for the first time. It’s true: We can often mask our emotions as men — put up an armour — but when you have a child, none of that matters. You need to be vulnerable and open for their sake. In fact, you don’t have a choice. It happens whether you like it or not. It can be scary, but the tsunami of love drowns out all of the fear. How does fatherhood affect the way you approach work? It makes you a better actor. You’re forced to be more imaginative, as you spend time with them. Children find beauty in the mundane. The other day I watched him try to put a cap on a bottle, always trying, figuring it out, and I found it wonderful. Children question things. Actors should, too. Where do you find purpose in your art? The idea that I’m producing a box-set of characters that will outlive me, as morbid as it sounds, exhilarates me. It’s a splash in a vast ocean. But maybe they help or inspire someone, as so many people have done for me. Who knows? We’re only here for a short while. It’d be nice to leave a positive imprint, no matter how small... This page, left: Brown Casentino wool coat, New & Lingwood. This page, right: Beige Solferino virgin wool and cashmere overcoat, Brioni; pure white cashmere rollneck, Canali; grey wool oversized Blake check Aleksandar pleated trousers, Kit Blake; black vegan grain Fred boots, Grenson. Opposite page: Black Cashseta cashmere and silk rollneck and light grey pure cashmere overshirt, Ermenegildo Zegna; brown wool fl annel textured single pleat Duke trousers, Kit Blake at The Rake. 18 TRME_16-21_Arbiter RIP Emmett J Scalan_11914740.indd 1830/12/2021 12:49:38 PM19 RAKE-IN- PROGRESS TRME_16-21_Arbiter RIP Emmett J Scalan_11914740.indd 1930/12/2021 12:49:44 PMThis page, top: Black and navy silk and wool tuxedo, Ermenegildo Zegna XXX; off-white signature cotton twill tuxedo shirt, Eton Shirts; black cotton bow-tie and white cotton pocket-square, Ralph Lauren Purple Label. This page, bottom: Black Watch Kent tartan dinner jacket, Gregory wool Barathea tuxedo trouser, black cotton bow-tie and white cotton pocket-square, all Ralph Lauren Purple Label; off-white signature cotton twill tuxedo Shirt, Eton Shirts. Opposite page: Multi silk evening jacket, Brioni; off-white signature cotton twill tuxedo shirt, Eton Shirts; Gregory wool Barathea tuxedo trouser, Ralph Lauren Purple Label; black vegan grain Fred Boots, Grenson. 20 TRME_16-21_Arbiter RIP Emmett J Scalan_11914740.indd 2030/12/2021 12:49:51 PMRAKE-IN- PROGRESS TRME_16-21_Arbiter RIP Emmett J Scalan_11914740.indd 2130/12/2021 12:50:24 PMToshiro Mifune in a scene from the fi lm Grand Prix, 1966. GETTY IMAGES FOLLOW SUIT TRME_22-27_Follow Suit Toshiro Mifune_11914746.indd 2230/12/2021 01:22:32 PMThe best actors disappear into their roles; the most transcendent come to embody the archetypes they portray. Thus, John Wayne became inseparable from the image of the granite-jawed, bow-legged, morally righteous cowboy, and Joe Pesci’s bug eyes and tightly wound demeanour inevitably come to mind whenever the spectre of a homicidal mobster is summoned. And the down-on-his-luck samurai, equal parts arrogant and bemused, who wanders into a lawless village and sets matters right? Look no further than Toshiro Mifune. Look no further, in fact, than the scene in 1961’s Yojimbo, one of the many samurai epics that Mifune made with the towering Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, where Mifune’s man with no name, sword poised in his kamishimo, stares down a bunch of goons on a dusty street before dispatching them in a measured, more- in-sorrow-than-in-anger kind of way. The adversaries are all about silent-movie face-pulling and expansive gesturing, in the highly stylised manner of Japan’s ancient Noh theatre, while Mifune’s moves are economical, almost feline in their quicksilver flit. “A samurai, in the world’s eyes, has Mifune’s fast wrists, his scruff, his sidelong squint,” wrote Moeko Fujii in an essay for the Criterion Collection to mark Mifune’s centenary in 2020. “He may have played warriors, but they weren’t typical heroes; they threw tantrums and fits, accidentally slipped off mangy horses, yawned, scratched, chortled and lazed. But when he extended his right arm, quick and low with a blade, he somehow summoned the tone of epics.” Mifune’s collaboration with Kurosawa is one of the great screen partnerships, a gift-that-keeps-on-giving on a par with that of De Niro and Scorsese or Bill Murray and Wes Anderson. They made 16 films together, from 1950’s Rashomon — whose tricksy plot involving differing accounts of a samurai’s murder made their international reputations and garnered Kurosawa the Oscar for best foreign film — to 1954’s The Seven Samurai and 1957’s Throne of Blood, a darkly brooding adaptation of Macbeth. Mifune became Japan’s leading international celebrity after world war II, but was characteristically self-effacing about his talents. “I’m not always great in pictures,” he once averred, “but I’m always true to the Japanese spirit.” That spirit — aloof, charismatic, mercurial — didn’t go unnoticed in Hollywood. Sergio Leone’s 1964 spaghetti western, A Fistful of Dollars, starring Clint Eastwood as The Man With No Name, was ‘inspired’ by Yojimbo to such a degree that it resulted in a successful lawsuit from Kurosawa’s production company, and a legendary letter from the director to his Italian counterpart: “Signor Leone, I have just had the chance to see your film. It is a very fine film, but it is my film.” Similarly, George Lucas has often cited 1958’s The Hidden Fortress — in which Mifune’s sword-wielding general tries to lead a young princess through enemy territory with the help of two bumbling peasants — as a key inspiration for Star Wars (Mifune reportedly turned down the roles of both Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader, fearing that the special effects would look too clunky). Perhaps that’s why Hollywood continues to revere him. Eastwood opined that “meeting him was like meeting the Asian equivalent of Clark Gable... He will always be the great samurai for us.” Steven Spielberg marvelled at his courage and “the way he just explodes on screen”. And Quentin Tarantino, perhaps the ultimate cinephile, provides his own homage by making Mifune the favourite actor of Cliff Booth, the stuntman portrayed by Brad Pitt with not a little of Mifune’s breezy suppleness in his recent novelisation of Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. By the time he met Kurosawa, Mifune had already learned a lot about grace under pressure. He was born to Japanese parents in the Chinese province of Manchuria, and he joined the Japanese Imperial Air Force in 1939. His son Shiro later told a documentary that his father’s military career had been dominated by fear and Toshiro Mifune, the actor who formed an illustrious partnership with Akira Kurosawa, brought charisma, ironic self-knowledge and intense physicality to no fewer than 150 film roles. “I’m not always great in pictures,” he said, “but I’m always true to the Japanese spirit.” HEART OF A WARRIOR by stuart husband 23 “When Mifune extended his right arm, quick and low with a blade, he somehow summoned the tone of epics.” TRME_22-27_Follow Suit Toshiro Mifune_11914746.indd 2330/12/2021 01:22:38 PM24 GETTY IMAGES, ALAMY Clockwise from top left: Mifune feeds the pigeons of St. Mark’s Square in Venice, 1961; taking a gondola ride during the same trip to Venice; Alain Delon and Mifune at a press conference for Le Gang in 1977; and with the director Akira Kurosawa in 1960. TRME_22-27_Follow Suit Toshiro Mifune_11914746.indd 2430/12/2021 01:22:43 PMdrudgery; he was hit by his superiors with the soles of their leather shoes for insubordination, and, later, when he was reluctantly training kamikaze pilots for their suicide missions, his advice to them was, “You don’t have to say ‘Banzai!’ for the Emperor. Instead, just say goodbye to your mother. That’s all you need to do.” Following the war, Mifune, then a starving labourer working under the U.S. occupation forces, made his way to Toho Studios in Tokyo, Japan’s largest film production company, where he thought he might attempt to parlay his final army job — air force photographer — into that of a cameraman; instead, his résumé somehow ended up among those of a bunch of aspiring actors taking part in a nationwide ‘New Faces’ contest. Kurosawa, in his autobiography, recalled that he was too busy to attend but was urged to see Mifune by the actress Hideko Takamine, who was one of the judges. “A young man was reeling around the audition room in a violent frenzy,” he recalled. “It was as frightening as watching a wounded or trapped savage beast trying to break loose. I stood transfixed. But it turned out that this young man was not really in a rage, but had drawn ‘anger’ as the emotion he was required to express in his screen test. He was acting. When he finished his performance, he regained his chair and, with an exhausted demeanour, flopped down and began to glare menacingly at the judges. Now, I know very well that this kind of behaviour was a cover for shyness, but the jury seemed to be interpreting it as disrespect.” So much so, in fact, that they voted to reject Mifune. It was only Kurosawa’s intervention that persuaded them to offer him a studio contract. “I am a person rarely impressed by actors,” Kurosawa said. “But in the case of Mifune, who could say in a single action what it took ordinary actors three separate movements to express, I was completely overwhelmed.” He wasn’t the only one. Whether Mifune was donning his samurai rig or sharp linen suiting and white coats to play cocky Yakuzas or wartime doctors, he brought a sense of ironic self- knowledge and intense physicality to all his roles (“no actor can do more with his physique,” purred the American critic Pauline Kael), and onlookers duly rolled out their zoological metaphors. The critics Anthony Lane and Michael Sragow described him as “a human hedgehog” and “a Japanese bull in a china shop”, respectively; for Martin Scorsese, the key to his “layered, complex” performances lay in the fact that “he studied the movements of lions. He’s like a caged animal.” FOLLOW SUIT “You don’t have to say ‘Banzai!’ for the Emperor. Just say goodbye to your mother. That’s all you need to do.” 25 Clockwise from left: shot for the fi lm buff magazine Eiga Fan in 1954; with the actress Machiko Kyo in Paris, 1974; and with Joan Collins, 1983. TRME_22-27_Follow Suit Toshiro Mifune_11914746.indd 2530/12/2021 01:22:52 PMGETTY IMAGES, ALAMY , SHUTTERSTOCK Clockwise from top: Charles Bronson, Alain Delon, Ursula Andress and Mifune on the set of the fi lm Sole Rosso (‘Red Sun’) directed by Terence Young, 1971; in Seven Samurai, 1954; in 1950’s Rashomon; posters for Rashomon and Grand Prix; with James Garner in Grand Prix, 1966; a poster for Sanjuro, 1962. TRME_22-27_Follow Suit Toshiro Mifune_11914746.indd 2630/12/2021 01:23:00 PMOff screen, Mifune cut a no less mythical fi gure, helping to reframe post-war Japan in his outward-looking image. Off screen, Mifune cut a no less mythical figure, helping to reframe post-war Japan in his own spirited, outward-looking image, whether piloting a Cessna low over his son’s elementary school courtyard, flinging red carnations out of the window for his wife — the actress Sachiko Yoshimine — and other mothers on Mother’s Day, sailing his own motorboat into a churning hurricane to save lives in 1958, out-flamenco-ing Gina Lollobrigida in an Italian nightclub, or driving his MG- TD (he also had a 1962 Rolls- Royce Silver Cloud) with a samurai sword balanced on the dash. And speaking of dash, there’s a case to be made for Mifune as one of the men’s style greats, up there with McQueen and Newman, for the way he came off as both effortless and crisp — the shot of him in a gondola on the Grand Canal in Venice, having picked up the best actor prize at the film festival in 1961 for Yojimbo, in a white knit polo, chinos and correspondent shoes, is an object lesson in simple but considered cool — and for his genius with detail, from an oversized hem cuff to a sockless woven loafer and a white floral tie against a white shirt, or a perfectly mussed collar under a V-neck knit. You can see his enduring influence today in the classically understated likes of Yasuto Kamoshita and his United Arrows line. After the 1965 period epic Red Beard, Mifune formed his own production company and he and Kurosawa parted ways. If he never quite equalled his achievements with his director/ mentor, the 1960s and seventies saw Mifune try his hand in a few Hollywood productions, including John Boorman’s Hell in the Pacific (1968), where he played a Japanese sailor stranded on an atoll with Lee Marvin, and Spielberg’s 1941 (1979), in which, as a clueless submarine commander, he got to replay world war II as slapstick farce. His star turn in the T.V. series Shogun (1980) may have been overshadowed by John Belushi’s shambling, grunting parodies of Mifune’s samurai legends on Saturday Night Live, but it at least earned him a Century City party where he stood for two hours receiving a steady stream of peers paying due obeisance, including Charlton Heston, Henry Fonda, Glenn Ford, Robert Mitchum, Robert Wagner, Natalie Wood and James Shigeta. Three years before Mifune’s death, in 1987, a Japanese magazine conducted a survey to determine who its readers thought best epitomised Japanese manhood; there could be only one answer. “Act with the heart of the warrior,” runs a line from the code of the Samurai, and there you have Toshiro Mifune, all gravity and grace, to the life. FOLLOW SUIT 27 Clockwise from left: cutting a dash in a pinstripe suit at the Beverly Hilton hotel in 1982; in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles, 1983; and his posthumous star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, unveiled in 2016. TRME_22-27_Follow Suit Toshiro Mifune_11914746.indd 2730/12/2021 01:23:09 PMNext >