Mitsui Koji was a Japanese movie, TV, and stage actor. He appeared in more than 150 films from 1925 to 1975, including 29 of Kinema Junpo’s annual Top-10 winners and three of its Top-10 best Japanese films of all time.

The son of a Shochiku movie theater owner, Mitsui joined the studio in 1924, making his film debut in 1925 under the name Mitsui Hideo. His short stature, soft features, and expressive face and voice suited him for rebellious “younger brother” roles, and he appeared as a youth lead in many silent and early sound films, notably in several Ozu Yasujiro classics and as a regular in the “Yota” film series.

Mitsui eventually left Shochiku, returning in 1948 as Mitsui Koji Mitsui and transitioning into character roles. In 1954 he joined other Shochiku performers to create the Madoka Group, a film production company intended to bring stability to their profession.

Like many popular character actors of post-war Japan, Mitsui occasionally headlined minor films but most often shone in key supporting parts. In 1957, Kurosawa Akira borrowed Mitsui from Shochiku to play the pivotal role of Yoshisaburo the gambler in The Lower Depths, whose final line in the film—annoyed that the suicide of one of the characters has ruined their party—is “always shocking, always devastating when viewed,” and Mitsui's delivery, which breaks the fourth wall, is “absolutely on target: ironic, cruel, funny, horrible.” Kurosawa subsequently borrowed Mitsui (who had appeared in a small part in the director's 1950 Shochiku film Scandal) for five more of his Toho films.

In 1957 Mitsui won the Mainichi Film Award for Best Supporting Actor for The Lower Depths as well as his performances in two films directed by Shibuya Minoru, Kichigai buraku (The Unbalanced Wheel) and Seigiha (Righteousness).

That year he also won the Blue Ribbon Award for Best Supporting Actor for The Lower Depths and Kichigai buraku. With these two awards for The Lower Depths, Mitsui was able to distinguish himself among the top performers in Japanese cinema, whom Kurosawa had selected and dress-rehearsed on-set for 60 days to create the ultimate acting ensemble.

Mitsui was a voice actor in Japan's first sound cartoon, Chikara to Onna no Yo no Naka (1933; now lost), and appeared in Japan's first color film, Carmen Comes Home (1951). A star of Ozu's 1934 original silent version of A Story of Floating Weeds, he was stunt-cast in the director's own widely acclaimed 1959 color remake, Floating Weeds, which Roger Ebert named as one of the ten greatest films of all time.

In addition to his many performances for prominent directors such as Kurosawa, Ozu, Kobayashi Masaki, and Kinoshita Keisuke, Mitsui is best known to Western audiences as the duplicitous village elder in Teshigahara Hiroshi's Oscar-nominated Woman in the Dunes (1964), for which he received above-the-title billing on the original film poster along with stars Okada Eiji and Kishida Kyoko.

(Source: Wikipedia) Edit Biography