Tatsuya Nakadai, who died at age 92 from pneumonia in a Tokyo hospital on Saturday, was one of the last surviving stars of Japanese cinema’s postwar golden age and worked with nearly all its most prominent directors. The collaboration he is best known for outside of Japan, however, was with Akira Kurosawa, for whom he appeared as everything from a punkish pistol-waving gangster in “Yojimbo” (1961) to a mad old lord modeled on King Lear in “Ran” (1985).

But when Nakadai was cast in “Seven Samurai” (1954) — his first time working with Kurosawa — he had a bruising experience with the director, who criticized him for not knowing how to walk like a samurai. “He crushed my confidence as an actor,” Nakadai told Tokyo Journal interviewer Anthony Al-Jamie in 2019.

Vowing to never work with the director again, Nakadai was filming Masaki Kobayashi’s war drama trilogy “The Human Condition” (1959-61) when he received an offer from Kurosawa to appear in “Yojimbo.” Nakadai repeatedly turned down the role, even after reading the script (“It was so interesting,” he told Al-Jamie) and getting permission from Kobayashi, who was Kurosawa’s close friend, he finally agreed to meet with Kurosawa and bluntly asked the director if he remembered him. “I’m asking you because I remember you,” Kurosawa said, and Nakadai signed on.