Toshiro Mifune

Toshiro Mifune made sixteen films with Akira Kurosawa and carried the samurai film to audiences who had never seen one. He was born in Qingdao, in China, and died in Japan, so the life began outside the country whose cinema it came to stand for.

He was born on 1 April 1920, which put him in his twenties through the war, with the Sun in Aries and not a single planet in air. Aries moves first and asks afterwards. With no air at all, the chart has nothing in it that pauses to weigh a thing up from a safe distance. For a man who came to film late, from outside the theatre, and whose entire effect on screen was physical rather than verbal, that is less a deficiency than a description of the instrument.

Mars rules that Sun, and it is retrograde in Scorpio and squares Jupiter with less than a degree in it: action outrunning sense, risk taken because it is available rather than because it is wise. That is the quality that reads as genuine danger on film rather than as performance. But Mars also makes a steady angle to Saturn, which is the opposite instruction entirely, being craft, training and the ability to stay at one thing for years. Sixteen films with one director is the second aspect, and the force inside each performance is the first one refusing to be disciplined out of it. Most careers get one of those or the other.

Saturn to Pluto is exact to within a fifth of a degree, the closest thing in the chart, and it is endurance plus authority that had to be earned rather than handed over, which is the exact position of a foreign-born actor carrying a national genre to foreign audiences. Five of his ten planets were retrograde, those two included, and a chart that retrograde belongs to somebody who works in his own order and does not show it happening.

His Moon is in Virgo, which settles a difficult feeling by finding a task. That is the private correction to all the size on screen: offstage, the method was order.

He died at Mitaka on 24 December 1997, at seventy seven, on a last quarter Moon, the phase that goes back to the question rather than the answer. Saturn had come back within two and a half degrees of the Sun he was born under, and Uranus was square the Mars that had driven the whole career. The Sun that day was in Capricorn, earth against his fire, which is the element that puts things down.