After moving to Los Angeles, Sessue Hayakawa became interested in acting and starred in his debut silent film in 1914 — and soon became the first Asian leading man in Hollywood.
Public DomainSessue Hayakawa was one of Hollywood’s first non-white leading actors.
Sessue Hayakawa had the class of Carey Grant, the clout of Lionel Barrymore, and the magnetism of Douglas Fairbanks. Despite the prejudice of early Hollywood, the Japanese actor sizzled on screen, a fiery persona burning beneath an elegant facade. He played villainous ivory merchants, noble colonels, pirate captains, spies, artists, and princes.
And his life off-screen was as fascinating as that of any character he portrayed.
Though it’s mired in some mystery, Hayakawa’s story is replete with adventure. It spanned a seppuku attempt in Imperial Japan, a successful career in silent film, and a return to the silver screen that resulted in an Oscar nomination.
While he is lesser known today than contemporaries like Anna May Wong and Rudolph Valentino, Sessue Hayakawa broke just as many barriers as they did, becoming the first leading man of Asian descent in American cinema as well as one of the first male sex symbols in early Hollywood.
The Early Life Of A Matinee Idol
The future prince of early Hollywood had an equally lofty upbringing. Born Kintarō Hayakawa in the Chiba Prefecture of Japan in 1886, he enjoyed a wealthy childhood. His family planned for him to join the Imperial Japanese Navy, and he entered the country’s naval academy in preparation when he was a teenager. However, while swimming to the bottom of a lagoon on a dare, he ruptured his eardrum, which caused him to fail the required Navy physical.
Hayakawa was so ashamed that he hadn’t lived up to his family’s expectations that he tried to take his own life by seppuku, the ritual suicide method traditionally practiced by samurai. According to his 1960 memoir, Zen Showed Me the Way, he locked himself in a shed and stabbed himself in the abdomen 30 times before his barking dog alerted his parents, who broke down the door with an ax and saved his life.
Public DomainSessue Hayakawa in 1918, four years after he made his silent film debut in The Typhoon.
The next part of Hayakawa’s story is debated. He wrote that he moved to the United States after he recovered from his injuries to study at the University of Chicago, but the school has no official record of his attendance there.
What is certain, however, is that Sessue Hayakawa got involved in the acting scene in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo neighborhood around 1913, eventually catching a film producer’s eye. In that moment, a new kind of star was born.
Sessue Hayakawa’s Career Beginnings In Silent Film
As Hayakawa wrote in his memoir, he traveled to Los Angeles after graduating from the University of Chicago to catch a ship back to Japan. The night before he was set to embark on his journey, however, he attended a play at the Japanese Theatre in Little Tokyo. “The performance tried my patience to such a point that when it ended I marched around to the stage door and demanded to see the manager,” Hayakawa wrote in his memoir.
He voiced his disappointment to the stage manager, who asked him if he thought he could do any better. Hayakawa stated that he could — and to prove it, he canceled his steamship ticket and accepted a role in an upcoming play.
Hayakawa found that he enjoyed acting, so after his initial performances, he continued appearing in shows at the Japanese Theatre while working a manual labor job at an ice plant on Catalina Island to make money.
Public DomainSessue Hayakawa pictured on a lobby card for the lost 1918 silent film The City of Dim Faces.
In 1914, he was in a play called The Typhoon. Hollywood producer Thomas Ince was in the audience one night and was so entranced by Hayakawa’s performance that he decided to turn the play into a silent film with the original cast as actors. The movie was a hit, and soon Hayakawa was starring in more silent films — which led to a studio contract.
Sessue Hayakawa’s big break came the following year with The Cheat, in which he starred as an elegant but sadistic ivory merchant named Hishuru Tori. In the film, Hishuru gives a white woman named Edith Hardy (played by Fannie Ward) $10,000 if she promises to repay him with sexual favors. When she tries to renege, Hishuru attempts to brand and rape her.
The role helped Hayakawa’s career skyrocket. The combination of his “exotic” sex appeal, his gentle features and athlete’s physique, and his natural approach to acting that contrasted the exaggerated pantomime typical of the late silent film era was incredibly appealing to audiences.
Even Cecil B. DeMille, the seasoned director of The Cheat, said of the burgeoning Hayakawa-mania: “I don’t understand it; it is new and strange, but it is the greatest thing I ever saw.”
Becoming An Early Hollywood Sex Symbol
By the early 1920s, Hayakawa’s career was hot, despite his frequent typecasting. Due to the way race relations and interracial relationships were perceived at the time, Hayakawa was primarily cast as a villain. He frequently represented “the other” in early Hollywood — the one who threatened to take the girl but never got to keep her.
Despite the lack of variety in his roles, Hayakawa was enormously successful. According to the Los Angeles Times, by 1920, he was making $7,500 a week — equivalent to over $125,000 in today’s currency. He was a guest at Hearst Castle and had an estate of his own, Hollywood’s Glengarry Castle.
Hayakawa was living the high life — but like the Roaring Twenties, it wouldn’t last forever.
Public DomainA promotional advertisement for Hayakawa’s films from a 1919 issue of the Exhibitors Herald.
Hayakawa tried to combat the rising nativist tensions in early Hollywood with a twofold strategy: acting like any other American star and launching Haworth Pictures Corporation. As the first Asian-owned production company in Hollywood, Haworth’s mission was to present authentic Japanese stories. As Hayakawa told Photoplay magazine in 1916, the roles he was typically cast in were not true to “Japanese nature.” He said, “They are false and give people a wrong idea of us. I wish to make a characterization which will reveal us as we really are.”
Despite Haworth’s success, anti-Japanese sentiment in the U.S. only continued to grow after World War I. This prejudice, combined with the advent of talking films, saw Sessue Hayakawa (who spoke with an accent) leave Hollywood in 1922.
He returned to the world of theater, acting in Broadway productions and traveling to Britain to perform for King George V and Queen Mary. He became popular in France, Germany, and even Russia. However, Hayakawa still had another chapter left in Hollywood.
Sessue Hayakawa’s Return To The Silver Screen
In 1931, Hayakawa briefly returned to Hollywood to star in Daughter of the Dragon. He faced new difficulties this time, however. The Hays Code was going into effect, and it forbade the portrayal of interracial romance onscreen. This meant that Hayakawa could only star in films that also featured Asian actresses as his love interests.
Throughout the remainder of the 1930s and the 1940s, he traveled between the U.S. and Europe, where he helped local Japanese communities in France during World War II. He acted in a few films and sold watercolor paintings to support himself.
Public DomainSessue Hayakawa (left) with Humphrey Bogart in a promotional photo for Tokyo Joe.
Then, in 1949, Hayakawa came back to Hollywood once again for a role in Tokyo Joe. He portrayed Baron Kimura, a mysterious Japanese aristocrat in U.S.-occupied Japan who butted heads with Humphrey Bogart’s all-American hero.
The film raised the curtain on Sessue Hayakawa’s second act in Hollywood. He worked steadily through the 1950s and early ’60s. His most famous role in this period was that of the admirable Colonel Saito in The Bridge on the River Kwai. Though the character is an antagonist, he is nuanced and noble.
The role allowed Hayakawa to achieve one of his goals since his early days in Hollywood. As he once stated, “I have played the villain too many times… just for once, I would like to play the hero.” His portrayal of Saito also earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
Turner Classic Movies/FacebookSessue Hayakawa was nominated for an Academy Award for his portrayal of Colonel Saito in Bridge on the River Kwai (1957).
Hayakawa ultimately retired and returned to Japan, where he began practicing Zen Buddhism.
Today, few people remember the name of this trailblazing star, a sex symbol and a crusading actor for Asian representation. Glengarry Castle is now an onramp, and many of Hayakawa’s films have been lost to history.
However, Sessue Hayakawa certainly left his mark on cinema.
After reading about Sessue Hayakawa, look through 48 photos of vintage Hollywood. Then, learn how Hollywood became the movie capital of the world.
