Takashi Shimura

Over two hundred films between 1934 and 1981, and twenty-one of Akira Kurosawa's thirty. Takashi Shimura, born in 1905, is the least flashy essential actor in Japanese cinema, and the reason his name comes second to Toshiro Mifune's is precisely the thing he was good at: absorbing rather than radiating.

Watch what he does inside a group. As Kambei in Seven Samurai he assembles the group by being the only man on screen who is not performing, and every other samurai is defined by how he reacts to that calm. As the woodcutter in Rashomon he is the audience's proxy, the man trying to make the accounts add up. As Watanabe in Ikiru, a municipal bureaucrat facing a terminal diagnosis, he plays someone who has been dead at his desk for decades and has to learn, clumsily and without dignity, how to want anything at all. It is one of the great screen performances, and it is built almost entirely out of posture and a voice that has stopped expecting to be listened to.

He was Kurosawa's constant. He is there in the early work, in Sanshiro Sugata and No Regrets for Our Youth, through Drunken Angel and Stray Dog and Scandal and The Idiot, into Throne of Blood, The Hidden Fortress, The Bad Sleep Well, Yojimbo, Sanjuro, High and Low and Red Beard, often in parts small enough that a lesser actor would have turned them down.

He had a second life at Toho as science fiction's voice of reason. As Professor Kyohei Yamane in Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again he is the scientist arguing for study over annihilation, and he came back across Mothra, The Mysterians, Gorath, Ghidorah the Three-Headed Monster and Frankenstein Conquers the World. He worked until 1981 and died the following year.