Which actor played Doctor Sanada in Drunken Angel?

Which actor played Doctor Sanada in Drunken Angel? Takashi Shimura played Doctor Sanada.

Akira Kurosawa’s 1948 film follows Sanada, an alcoholic physician working in a poor postwar neighborhood beside an open sump. He treats Matsunaga, a yakuza patient played by Toshiro Mifune, and discovers that the gangster has tuberculosis. Their uneasy relationship drives the film: Sanada tries to persuade Matsunaga to abandon drinking, smoking, and organized crime.

Shimura’s performance gives the doctor a mixture of compassion, frustration, self-loathing, and stubborn moral purpose. The title’s “drunken angel” is often understood to refer to Sanada, although some critics argue that Sanada and Matsunaga function as angels to one another. The other options are fellow Kurosawa collaborators, but they did not play this central role.