broke barriers on screen as one of Hollywood's first Asian-American actors to play romantic lead characters. In Bridge to the Sun, a 1961 film based on a memoir of the same name, Shigeta played Hidenari Terasaki, a dashing Japanese diplomat from Tokyo who meets cute and later marries Gwen Harold, a young white woman from Johnson City, Tenn.

Bridge to the Sun was based on a memoir about a real-life interracial couple living in Japan during World War II. Warner Archive YouTube

The 'Tragedy' Of Being Asian-American

Only two years earlier, Shigeta had made his film debut in The Crimson Kimono as a Japanese-American homicide detective in Los Angeles caught in a love triangle between his white police partner and a key witness in their murder case. For a black-and-white filmfrom 1959, there was a bit of a surprise ending for Shigeta's character.

"Oh, he wound up with the girl!" Shigeta explained with a hearty laugh in the 2006 documentary The Slanted Screen: Asian Men in Film and Television.

The plotline became a selling point for The Crimson Kimono. Movie posters showed Shigeta's character kissing a white woman. "Yes, this is a beautiful American girl in the arms of a Japanese boy!" one poster declared. "What was his strange appeal for American girls?"

In The Crimson Kimono, Shigeta plays a homicide detective investigating the murder of a burlesque dancer in Los Angeles. Sony Pictures Home Entertainment YouTube

Shigeta's role in that film won him a Golden Globe Award in 1960 for most promising newcomer.

"He clearly had the talent, but the roles weren't