Actor And Martial Arts Legend Sonny Chiba Has Died At 82

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Sonny Chiba at the New York Premiere of Kill Bill Vol. 1.





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Perhaps Chiba’s biggest booster in the United States was writer and director Quentin Tarantino, who wrote a reference to him into 1993’s True Romance, cribbed the famed Ezekiel 25:17 speech in Pulp Fiction from the opening of a Chiba movie, and finally cast him as the retired swordsmith Hattori Hanzo in the Kill Bill movies.

Outside of his onscreen work, Chiba formed the Japan Action Club, where he trained aspiring martial arts actors and stunt workers. This was inspired by a love of American action movies, he told the crowd through a translator at GalaxyCon Raleigh in 2019. He said that people misunderstood the «action in the group’s name to refer to «action movies. Instead, he said, he meant it to refer to filmmaking more broadly—as in lights, camera, action.