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When famed Japanese director and writer Akira Kurosawa died in 1998 the film world mourned one of its most inspiring identities.

Kurosawa was a true emperor – his influence spread far and wide beyond his own borders, given homage in a range of western movies, from the `spaghetti westerns’ of the 60s and 70s, to the Star Wars saga.

The man who would be the world’s greatest writer and director was born in Tokyo in 1910, the youngest of nine children. His early life was marred with tragedy. He witnessed the devastation and death caused by an earthquake in 1923, and his beloved older brother Heigo committed suicide.

Kurosawa found solace in art. By the age of 19 he was exhibiting his paintings, but in 1936 his destiny took a hand and he entered to the world of filmmaking. He directed his first film Sugata Sanshiro in 1943, but it wasn’t until 1950 that he made the film that marked as one of the world’s great directors.

Earlier in his career, Kurosawa had worked with a young Japanese actor called Toshiro Mifune. In Rashomon, the two combined forces to begin a movie partnership that would spawn some of the most imitated films in screen history.

In Rashomon, Mifune plays Tajomaru, a bandit accused of killing a samurai and raping his wife. Tajomaru and the injured wife give radically different versions of what happened – a psychic is called in top channel the murdered husband, but a different version of events is heard. Finally a woodcutter who witnessed the crimes offers his own version.

Kurosawa’s many layered way of looking at a story continues to be imitated – as recently as 2002, the Chinese film Hero used the same approach, telling the one story from different points of view.

Kurosawa and Mifune made 16 films together, including Seven Samurai, Yojimbo and Throne of Blood (based on Shakespeare’s MacBeth) and are still widely regarded as one of the most dynamic actor/director teams ever to have existed.

But the collaboration ended in a rift with the completion of Red Beard in 1965 – the red beard Mifune had to grow for the title role kept him from working on other projects and put the actor under financial strain. The two remained estranged for 30 years but were briefly reconciled before both men died.

But the movies from that period of collaboration created an international sensation. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences created a `foreign film’ category of its Oscar awards so that Rashomon could be honored. The character Mifune and Kurosawa created for Yojimbo of the down at heel ronin (masterless samurai) became the inspiration for Clint Eastwood’s nameless character in the spaghetti western `Dollar’ films. Seven Samurai was remade by Hollywood as The Magnificent Seven – even Rashomon was remade by Hollywood as The Outrage. George Lucas cited The Hidden Fortress as a major influence on Star Wars. Lucas also made good use of Kurosawa’s favorite `wipe effect’ to change scenes.

The rift with Mifune, and a failed attempt to direct his first American film Tora! Tora! Tora! led to a bout of depression in 1971, when Kurosawa attempted suicide by slashing his wrists. The attempt failed, but it wasn’t until 1975 that he again won a best Foreign Language Film Oscar for Dersu Azala, which he made in the Soviet Union.

In 1980 he returned to full strength as a director, when admirers Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas helped finance Kagemusha, the story of a poor thief who is recruited to impersonate a dead warlord.

His next film Ran was a Japanese version of King Lear, which set him firmly back on his throne as the Emperor of Film. Ran was an international success, and like Kagemusha, starred Kurosawa’s new muse, actor Tatsuya Nakadai.

Kurosawa made only three more films before his death, and each was an intensely personal retrospective of the events of his own life. Dreams drew on actual dreams Kurosawa had as a child and a young man, presented in eight bittersweet vignettes.

Rhapsody in August looks back at the dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki in 1945.

His final film, Madadayo, is a gentle, Goodbye Mr Chips kind of story about a retired schoolteacher. He was planning to make another film when he died of a stroke at 88. His greatest muse and estranged friend Toshiro Mifune had died just ten months earlier.

In 1990, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presented Kurosawa with a lifetime achievement award. In 1998, George Lucas and Martin Scorsese were among the 35,000 actors, directors and admirers that gathered to mourn him at a public funeral service held at the Kurosawa studios in Yokohama.