Sessue Hayakawa

Sessue Hayakawa, born Kintarō Hayakawa on June 10, 1886, in the village of Nanaura in Chiba Prefecture, Japan, was an actor whose career spanned silent film, sound film, stage, and Broadway. He appeared on Broadway between 1926 and 1959, with credits including the plays Kataki and The City. He died on November 23, 1973.

Hayakawa's path to acting was shaped by a series of significant personal events. His family had intended him for a career as a naval officer, but a ruptured eardrum sustained while diving at the naval academy in Etajima ended that ambition. The failure brought shame upon his family, and the resulting estrangement from his father drove the eighteen-year-old Hayakawa to attempt seppuku, stabbing himself more than thirty times in the abdomen before his parents broke down the door and saved his life. After his recovery, he traveled to the United States, where he studied political economics at the University of Chicago with the goal, at his family's direction, of becoming a banker. He graduated in 1912. That account of his education has been disputed by scholars, including University of California San Diego professor Daisuke Miyao, who found no record of Hayakawa's enrollment at Chicago and suggested his early years in California more likely involved a series of odd jobs, including work as a dishwasher, waiter, ice cream vendor, and factory worker.

Hayakawa began his acting career in 1913, adopting the stage name Sessue, meaning "snowy continent" in Japanese. His performance in a stage production of The Typhoon attracted the attention of film producer Thomas H. Ince, who adapted the play into a silent film released in 1914 with the original cast. Hayakawa had reportedly attempted to discourage Ince by demanding five hundred dollars a week, but Ince agreed to the fee. The film was a success and led to additional pictures produced by Ince, including The Wrath of the Gods and The Sacrifice, both released in 1914. Jesse L. Lasky subsequently signed Hayakawa to Famous Players–Lasky, the company now known as Paramount Pictures.

His breakthrough came with The Cheat in 1915, directed by Cecil B. DeMille and co-starring Fannie Ward. The film made Hayakawa a romantic idol and established him as the first actor of Asian descent to achieve stardom as a leading man in the United States and Europe. He became one of Hollywood's highest-paid performers, earning five thousand dollars per week in 1915. Dissatisfied with persistent typecasting, Hayakawa formed his own production company, Haworth Pictures Corporation, through which he produced twenty-three films and earned two million dollars by 1920. His salary at the height of his fame in 1919 reached over thirty-five hundred dollars per week. Critics recognized his understated, Zen-influenced acting style, which he described through the concept of muga, or the absence of doing, in deliberate contrast to the broad gestures common in performance of the era.

Rising anti-Japanese sentiment and business difficulties led Hayakawa to leave Hollywood in 1922. He subsequently performed on Broadway and worked in Japan and Europe before returning to Hollywood in the 1931 film Daughter of the Dragon. His Broadway appearances during this period and through 1959 included roles in Kataki and The City.

Among his sound-era film roles, Hayakawa is most widely recognized for his portrayal of Colonel Saito in The Bridge on the River Kwai, released in 1957, a performance that earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He also appeared as the pirate captain in Swiss Family Robinson in 1960. Over the course of his career, Hayakawa starred in more than eighty feature films. Three of his films — The Cheat, The Dragon Painter, and The Bridge on the River Kwai — have been preserved in the United States National Film Registry.