Oscar Profile #571: Sessue Hayakawa

Born June 10, 1886 in Chikura, Japan, Kitano Hayakawa was the son of an imperial Japanese naval officer who planned to follow in his father’s footsteps until he ruptured his eardrum in a deep-sea dive at the age of 18. The despondent teenager attempted suicide by stabbing himself in the abdomen thirty times, but his dog alerted the family, and his plan was thwarted.

In 1907, Hayakawa helped organize a rescue effort to help an American steamship that crashed in Tokyo Bay. Inspired by the Americans he met on the ship, he set sail for America a few months later. His life changed forever when he discovered the Japanese theatre scene in L.A.’s Little Tokyo. He fell in love with a young actress named Tusuru Aoiki and adopted the stage name of Sessue. He and Aoki married in 1914, the year he made his Hollywood film debut

Hayakawa’s early films including The Wrath of the Gods and Typhoon, which he made for producer Thomas Ince, were hits and he was given a contract with Famous Players-Lasky, which later became Paramount.

The actor’s first film for Famous Players-Lasky was 1915’s The Cheat directed by Cecil B. DeMille, in which he starred opposite Caucasian stage actress Fannie war. It made him one of the screen’s earliest male sex symbols, predating even the rise of Rudolph Valentino whose career didn’t really take off until 1921.

By 1918, Hayakawa had his own production company, turning out film after film. He became one of the wealthiest and best-known men in the world, but he squandered his money on lavish parties, cars, and gambling debts. He stopped making films for a while in 1922 after learning of a plot by his business partners to kill him for insurance money. Returning to the stage, he went abroad, appearing on stage and making films in France. He wrote a novel, The Bandit Prince, which he turned into a play which he brought back to the U.S. He returned to Hollywood in 1931 to make his first sound film, Daughter of the Dragon in which he played a Scotland Yard detective.

Living in Japan with his wife and three children in the 1930s, Hayakawa was persuaded to return to France in 1937 for what was to be a temporary separation from his family. He spent the next two years making films in France and was then unable to leave due to World War II. After the war, Allied authorities refused to allow him to return to Japan. He was recued by Humphrey Bogart who wanted him to play the villain in his 1949 film, Tokyo Joe. Tracking him down in Paris, Bogart had him flown to Tokyo fir the film’s location filming. The film’s success put him in demand again, this time as a character actor, most notably as a Japanese commandant in 1950’s Three Came Home and in a similar albeit more complex version of the same in 1957’s The Bridge on the River Kwai for which he received an Oscar nomination.

Ironically, the actor who rose to international fame playing the Japanese lover of a white woman lost the Oscar to Red Buttons playing an American G.I. who falls in love with a Japanese girl in post-war Tokyo in Sayonara.

Subsequent films included Green Mansions, Hell to Eternity, and Swiss Family Robinson.

Hayakawa’s beloved wife died in 1961. He carried on making films for a few more years before returning to Japan where he lived modestly and studied Zen Buddhism until his death on November 23, 1973 at the age of 87.

ESSENTIAL FILMS

THE CHEAT (1915) , directed by Cecil B. DeMille

Hayakawa became an international superstar and one of the screen’s first male sex symbols with his portrayal of the Japanese big game hunter who seduces a married white woman (stge star Fannie Ward) and later brands her with a branding iron. Japanese protests led to the character’s name change and nationality change to Burmese for the film’s 1918 rerelease. Remade twice, the 1931 remake changed the character to a white man steeped in Japanese culture. Starring Tallulah Bankhead and Irving Pichel, that version was a snooze fest dead on arrival at the box office whereas the Hayakawa version remains highly watchable.

TOKYO JOE (1949) , directed by Stuart Heisler

In France from 1937 though World War II and kept from returning to Japan by the Allied authorities after the war, it took producer-star Humphrey Bogart to get him out of France and beck to Japan for this on-location post-war thriller in which Bogart plays the co-owner of a Tokyo nightclub that he left seven years earlier just before the attack on Pearl Harbor. He returns to find the wife he though dead (Florence Marly) has remarried and has a child. Alexander Knox is her lawyer second husband. Hayakawa, playing against his own beliefs, is a patrician financier engaged in a plot to regain control of his country.

THREE CAME HOME (1950) , directed by Jean Negulesco

The true story of the Japanese occupation of Borneo shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor stars Claudette Colbert as Agnes Newton Keith, the woman on whose book it is based. Patric Knowles co-stars as her husband with Hayakawa in a rare for the time three-dimensional characterization of a Japanese prison commandant. Colbert considered this her favorite role. It was a major comeback for the enduring star after dropping out of both State of the Union in which she was replaced by Katharine Hepburn and All About Eve in which she was replaced by Bette Davis.

THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI (1957) , directed by David Lean

Hayakawa had the role of his career as the Japanese commandant in Lean’s masterfurl production in which and Oscar winner Alec Guinness as the leader of the prisoners tasked with building the bridge played a game of cat-and-mouse. Nominated for 8 Oscars and winner of 7, Hayakawa was the only non-winner among the nominees of the year’s Best Picture winner. He lost to Red Buttons in Sayonara whose co-star Miyoshi Umeki won for Best Supporting Actress. William Holden, Jack Hawkins, James Donald, Geoffrey Horne, André Morell, and Percy Herbert were also prominently featured.

SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON (1960) , directed by Ken Annakin

This Disney production was the fourth film version of the classic novel by Johann David Wyss (1783-1830) which has since been filmed for the screen and TV an additional ten times. John Mills and Dorothy McGuire played the parents of the family stranded on a deserted island after a shipwreck with James MacArthur, Tommy Kirk, and Kevin Corcoran as their three sons. Hayakawa played the leader of the marauding pirates, a role typical of his late career. If you can find it, check out the 1940 version with Thomas Mitchell and Edna Best as the parents and Freddie Bartholomew, Tim Holt, and Terry Kilburn as the sons, for comparison.