Shinichi "Sonny" Chiba looked like he knew how to crack skulls. In his 1974 international breakout film, The Street Fighter, Chiba plays a mercenary who relentlessly smashes goons' faces, breaks their bones and punches them so hard that they leave with gut-wrenching blows. I spit. A cult figure in the United States, Chiba gained widespread popularity after appearing in films such as the Kill Bill series and The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift.
Chiba died Thursday at the age of 82, his management company announced. His friend Ryuji Yamakita, director and producer of Chiba's final film, confirmed that he died at a hospital in Chiba Prefecture, Japan, after complications from COVID-19.
Sonny Chiba was a prolific actor in Japanese film and TV, working closely with the famous production company Toei. His fame became widespread with the international release of The Street Fighter, a bloody truce through the Japanese underground that upon its US release was billed as "the first X-rated fight scene in screen history". The film lived up to its press hype, with Sonny Chiba making his way through nameless bad guys. (Warning that in the clip below, Chiba punches an opponent's teeth).
Perhaps Chiba's biggest booster in the United States was writer and director Quentin Tarantino, who wrote a reference to him in 1993's True Romance, took the famous Ezekiel 25:17 speech in Pulp Fiction from the opening of the Chiba movie, and finally gave him Cast retired swordsman Hatori Hanzo in the Kill Bill movies.
In addition to his onscreen work, Chiba formed the Japan Action Club, where he trained aspiring martial arts actors and stunt workers. It was inspired by a love of American action movies, he told the crowd at GalaxyCon Raleigh in 2019 through a translator. He said that people misunderstood the "action" in the group's name to refer to "action films". Instead, he said, he meant to refer to filmmaking more broadly – such as lights, cameras, action.