silent screen idol...sessue hayakawa (H in H pt 2e)

handsome and flamboyant, he gave some of hollywoods legendary parties.   hayakawa was paramount studio's first choice for the role of THE SHEIK, that launched rudolph valentino's career in 1918.   (sessue san turned it down,
to form his own production company...and the (then) relatively 'unknown' valentino's career was forever changed).

there is SO MUCH to know about this actor, that there is no way i could give it proper depth in this blog, but if you are interested, there is a great article at this link:   
http://goldsea.com/Personalities/Hayakawas/hayakawas.html

also, his imdb profile:  http://imdb.com/name/nm0370564/bio

i'll mentions some key points here, and the BOLD points are my funny HIRO LINKS that i always see.

he was known as the JAPANESE heartthrob in hollywoods's silent era!   appealing to woman of ANY race.  (that qualifies, yes?)

he was born into a samurai class family and his father had been the governor of CHIBA prefecture.  (TLS and SONNY)

he was a martial artist and in his later years, a zen buddhist priest.   yet in his younger days, he was QUITE the
party boy, in hollywood and france!    (our guy LOVES to party...yes?)

he traveled thru europe and studied the classics, returning to japan, where he presented works of SHAKESPEARE.
he performed in the u.s. and it was during this time that he was discovered by an american producer, thomas ince In
1913!   (hiro's performing shakespeare in ENGLISH deepened his appetite for branching out beyond japan)  (this is what i 'understand' to be the case....please forgive me if this is inaccurate)    but sessue san performing SHAKESPEARE on stage, and launching his HOLLYWOOD career is amazing to me.  

his 'breakthrough' role was a silent film called THE CHEAT, and he played an IVORY MERCHANT who has an affair with a WHITE woman.    (hee hee...okay, maybe that is a stretch....but  merchant ivory...white countess..oh my)
interestingly, THE CHEAT is available on NETFLIX.   cool, eh?   while this clip is not from that movie, it DOES show him in the silent era.   (takes a few seconds to begin...but it does open up the clip) 

he had several 'career phases'....in the U.S., japan, and france.  i did not get the impression he was very successful in japan....michi or rin rin...did you know of him in japan?    (i just read that in tokyo in 1989 they did a musical based on his life, so maybe you DID know of him).  

anti-japanese sentiments in the U.S. affected his first career phase, as well as his second.  but his second phase seems to have been equally affected by his heavy accent, and lack of english skills.  
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i loved this part, from his imdb bio:

After the Second World War, he took a third shot at Hollywood. In 1949, he relaunched  himself as a character actor with "Tokyo Joe" (1949) in support of Humphrey Bogart and "Three Came Home" (1950) with Claudette Colbert. Hayakawa reached the apex of this, his third career, with his role as the martinet prisoner-of-war camp commandant in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), which brought him an Academy Award nomination for Best Suporting Actor. His performance as Colonel Saito was essential to the success of David Lean's film, built as it was around the battle of wills between Hayakawa's commandant and Alec Guinness's Colonel Nicholson, head of the Allied POWs. The film won the Best Picture Academy Award while Lean and Guiness also were rewarded with Oscars.

*sessue san was one of only six Asian actors nominated for an Academy Award. The others are Miyoshi Umeki, Haing S. Ngor (for The Killing Fields), Rinko Kikuchi for Babel, Mako for The Sand Pebbles and Ken Watanabe for The Last Samurai.
*this is inaccurate, as pat noriyuki morita was also nominated.    he lost the oscar to haing s.ngor.   so it is really 7.

he retired in 1966 and died in japan in the 1973.   Ninety years after achieving stardom, he remains one of the few Asians to assume superstar status in American motion pictures

since 1998 his starmeter has ranged from 6000 to 15,000.   almost 40 years after he left hollywood, his starmeter still remains at a respectable 15,561 as of today.

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an article about him wrote this:

"My one ambition is to play a hero." Sound like a sentiment echoing in the hearts of today's Asian American actors?. Sessue Hayakawa said it back in 1949.

i'll close with his own words, which sounds very much like OUR hiro.

In his autobiography, Zen Showed Me The Way, Hayakawa observes, "All my life has been a journey. But my journey differs from the journeys of most men...."