Sessue Hayakawa

Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom By Daisuke Miyao. While the actor Sessue Hayakawa (1886–1973) is perhaps best known today  for his Oscar-nominated turn as a Japanese military officer in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957),  in the early twentieth century he was an internationally renowned  silent film star, as recognizable as Charlie Chaplin or Douglas  Fairbanks. In this critical study of Hayakawa’s stardom, Daisuke Miyao  reconstructs the Japanese actor’s remarkable career, from the films that  preceded his meteoric rise to fame as the star of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Cheat (1915) through his reign as a matinee idol and the subsequent decline and resurrection of his Hollywood fortunes. Drawing  on early-twentieth-century sources in both English and Japanese,  including Japanese-language newspapers in the United States, Miyao  illuminates the construction and reception of Hayakawa’s stardom as an  ongoing process of cross-cultural negotiation. Hayakawa’s early w