Clint Eastwood has been in the orbit of legends spanning multiple generations, becoming one of them himself in the process.

He’s seen superstars come and go, icons fade away, legends be born in front of his eyes, and seen more than his fair share of flashes in the pan, but throughout it all, he’s endured. Fittingly, then, the actor he compared to a ‘Golden Age’ great inadvertently played a major role in his own ascension.

One of the most consistent box office draws in Hollywood from the 1930s through to the 1950s, Clark Gable won an Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’ in It Happened One Night and found further success with Mutiny on the Bounty and Gone with the Wind, the latter setting a record that surely can’t be broken after selling more tickets in the United States than any other.

Gable passed away before Eastwood had even become a household name in Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy, but he nonetheless saw a performer from the other side of the world as being his international equivalent, and the influence he had on the four-time Oscar winner’s own career was immense.

Not that the production initially wanted to admit it, though, with Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars only crediting Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo as its predecessor when production company Toho filed a lawsuit that was settled out of court and reportedly saw the Japanese auteur earn more money from the unofficial remake than he did from his original.

It was one of just 16 films Kurosawa made with long-time leading man Toshiro Mifune and one of several that can be called true masterpieces of cinema. The actor had a hugely successful career in both film and television, but his decades-spanning partnership with his friend and colleague is the one that defined him.

Mifune was a formidable presence in not only Yojimbo, Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, and The Hidden Fortress, to name just a few, but also Hiroshi Ingaki’s Samurai trilogy and the original Shogun miniseries. When he passed away in December 1997 at the age of 77, Eastwood was one of the first to pay tribute.

“Needless to say, I was a great fan of his,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “I always loved Yojimbo, and when I had a chance to do a western remake I felt it was an opportunity. His performance in Yojimbo was definitely an inspiration for me. I only met him once, to meet him was like meeting the Asian equivalent of Clark Gable. He will always be the great samurai for us.”

They always shared that unspoken connection over Yojimbo, but it was clear that Eastwood valued Mifune very highly as both a person and an indelible presence in world cinema.