Chiba, a martial arts movie star from his native Japan, made his name by landing punches and stabbing fictional enemies in the throat with just his fingers.
His relentlessness on screen inspired action authors such as director Quentin Tarantino and actor Keanu Reeves to emulate his style in his own plays, and thrilled viewers when they didn’t cover their eyes.
Chiba, a fiercely talented, internationally renowned martial artist with films such as “The Street Fighter” and “Kill Bill,” died this week from complications from COVID-19, his representative Timothy Beal confirmed to CNN.
Chiba was 82 years old.
His fighting style earned him famous admirers
Chiba, born in Sadaho Maeda, started in martial arts training with Mas Oyama, considered a master of karate. And to master it, Chiba did: he won several black belts during his time under Oyama’s wing, according to Variety. He did not show his martial arts skills on screen until 1973 in the movie “Karate Kiba”.
Comparisons with famous Hong Kong American martial artist Bruce Lee were inevitable.
But Chiba’s different fighting style was different from anything Lee tried. Chiba confronted his enemies and seemed to use more force to land his blows, a method that underscored the choreographic nature of his cinematic spars. And his characters almost always killed his opponents.
All the similarities with Lee were crushed with the 1974 release of the violently shocking international clash “The Street Fighter”, in which Chiba, as martial arts mercenary Takuma Tsurugi, half a man strong enough to make him lose several teeth and crush that of another man. skull. The protagonists of Chiba were ruthless antiheroes who were willing to shed blood, a character trait that informs many contemporary action movies.
“For me, the most enjoyable role to play is the bad guy,” he said in a 2007 interview with British television personality Jonathan Ross.
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That particularly brutal scene erupted that was reduced to an x-ray of a skull after Chiba’s character broke his idea, a solution to show the damage at once without trying, he said.
Chiba’s style earned him famous fans such as Tarantino, who first referred to the great martial artist in the 1993 film “True Romance”, for which he wrote the screenplay. Chiba would later appear in the director’s two films “Kill Bill”.
In “True Romance,” Christian Slater’s Clarence Worley tells Chiba “the nobody bar, the greatest actor working in martial arts movies today.”
He was kinder than his fearsome film roles
Chiba had a prolific career in film and television, with more than 200 credits on IMDb. Western audiences may have seen him in “The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift,” in which he played a ruthless Yakuza boss, but most of the films and series he made in the latter part of the his career was premiered in Japan.
Chiba had another movie underway before he died, Beal, his representative, said in an email to CNN. Despite what his opposing roles should make the public believe, Chiba was a “humble, affectionate, and kind man,” Beal said.
This was made clear in a 2015 interview with Keanu Reeves. The action star of “The Matrix” and “John Wick” told a Japanese media outlet that Chiba was one of the best actors in martial arts cinema. Chiba then surprised Reeves during the interview and praised “John Wick,” visibly delighting Reeves.
“Character and action … you got together,” Reeves told him. “There was always heart in (Chiba’s characters.)”
Chiba joked that he could learn a thing or two from Reeves, though Chiba no doubt created the blueprints that Reeves tried to follow for decades.
Chiba, like Takuma Tsurugi, tore his throat with his bare hands before Reeves, like John Wick, could creatively kill opponents with a well-placed pencil. He never made it easy (the faces of his characters betrayed the pain he felt as often as he shared the pain with his enemies), but the ambivalent tone he gave to his representations inspired much of the action loved by the current spectators.