Sessue Hayakawa
2 credits on HibingeTV
Japanese actor, born in 1889, who became one of the first Asian stars of American cinema. His commanding performance in Cecil B. DeMille's The Cheat (1915) made him a matinee idol and one of the highest-paid actors of the silent era. He founded his own production company, Haworth Pictures, in 1918. He later earned an Academy Award nomination for his role as the camp commandant in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). He died in 1973.
Acted In
Drama, Crime
A venal socialite embezzles from a charity and turns to a Burmese ivory trader to cover the loss, only to find he expects her body as payment. When she tries to renege, he brands her with a hot iron. Cecil B. DeMille's 1915 melodrama was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry for its significance and for Sessue Hayakawa's landmark performance, which made him one of the first Asian stars of American cinema and a genuine matinee idol. The film's treatment of race and sexuality was controversial even at the time: a Japanese-American newspaper in Los Angeles campaigned against it, and the 1918 re-release changed Hayakawa's character from Japanese to Burmese to avoid offending a wartime ally. Fannie Ward plays the spoiled wife whose recklessness sets the catastrophe in motion. As a work published before 1930, the film is in the public domain in the United States.
Drama · Crime · Silent
The Cheat
1915 - as Hishuru Tori / Haka Arakau
War, Drama
A 1950 American war drama directed by Jean Negulesco and produced by Nunnally Johnson, based on Agnes Newton Keith's memoir of her imprisonment by the Japanese in Borneo during World War II. Claudette Colbert plays Keith, an American writer living in North Borneo who is separated from her husband (Patric Knowles) and interned with her young son in a brutal women's POW camp, where the camp commander Colonel Suga (Sessue Hayakawa) — an admirer of her book — proves an ambiguous figure. Grim and unusually frank for a studio picture of its era, the film was shot on location and earned Colbert some of the strongest reviews of her career. It entered the public domain through non-renewal.
War · Drama
Three Came Home
1950 - as Colonel Michio Suga