How many films, based on plays written by William Shakespeare, did the film director, Akira Kurosawa, make?

Film director, Akira Kurosawa, created three films based on three of Shakespeare's plays: "Throne of Blood" (1957), "Ran" (1985), and "The Bad Sleep Well" (1960). With these adaptations, as three very acclaimed versions of his works, Kurosawa has truly pleased many movie fans all over the world.

Critics and fans have described filmmaker, Kurosawa, as a cultural hybrid. He fuses Japanese and Western cinematic techniques in his films. In "Throne of Blood" and "Ran", for example, he uses the aesthetics of 'noh', a form of dance-drama, in his production design, while adding traces of the classic western in his battle scenes.

Kurosawa’s most prominent Shakespeare film "Throne of Blood" is based on "Macbeth". The characters and plot of the film are almost a one-to-one correlation with the play. However, the film cannot be viewed solely as a literary adaptation. In film critic Stephen Prince’s words, “it was more an act of historiography than literary analysis … Kurosawa found a kind of mirror universe ... that Shakespeare wrote about in 'Macbeth'.” Set in Japan's 15th-century civil wars, Kurosawa uses Shakespeare’s plot to depict the violent struggles that occurred between rival clans in Japan.

His other two films are less prominent. "Ran" is a period epic adaptation of "King Lear" and the history of 16th-century warlord Mori Motonari. "The Bad Sleep Well" is a film noir thriller about corporate corruption and family in postwar Japan. It has themes and devices from "Hamlet".