While working as an elevator operator at the Asakusa France-za strip club, he became an apprentice of its comedian Senzaburo Fukami and eventually the theater's MC.

This sort of duo comedy, known as manzai in Japan, usually features a great deal of high-speed back-and-forth banter between the two performers.

The targets of his jokes were often the socially vulnerable, including the elderly, the handicapped, the poor, children, women, the ugly and the stupid.

It was broadcast years later in the United States under the title Most Extreme Elimination Challenge, with Takeshi renamed "Vic Romano".

[4] His first major film role was in Nagisa Oshima's Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (cast as a tough POW camp sergeant during World War II opposite Tom Conti, Ryuichi Sakamoto and David Bowie).

He was the first Japanese celebrity to actively contribute to the development of a video game and starred in several commercials promoting its release.

Takeshi no Chōsenjō and its development was later the subject of the first episode of GameCenter CX, a gaming variety show hosted by Osaka comedian Shinya Arino.

[3] Mark Schilling cited it as the film in which Kitano defined his style with long takes, minimal camera movement, brief dialogue, sly humor, and sudden violence.

In August 1994, Kitano was involved in a motorscooter accident and suffered injuries that caused partial paralysis of the right-side of his face.

This Airplane!-like assemblage of comedic scenes, all centering loosely around a Walter Mitty-type character trying to have sex in a car, met with little acclaim in Japan.

Much of the film satirizes popular Japanese culture, such as Ultraman or Godzilla and even the Zatoichi character that Kitano himself would go on to play eight years later.

Although for years already Kitano's largest audience had been the foreign arthouse crowd, Hana-bi cemented his status internationally as one of Japan's foremost modern filmmakers.

[5] Kitano himself said it was not until he won this award that he was accepted as a serious director in Japan; prior his films were looked at as just the hobby of a famous comedian.

[9] Among his most significant acting roles were Nagisa Oshima's 1999 film Taboo, in which he played Captain Hijikata Toshizo of the Shinsengumi.

Kikujiro, released in 1999 and named after his father, was a semi-comedy featuring Kitano as a ne'er-do-well crook who winds up paired up with a young boy looking for his mother, and goes on a series of misadventures with him.

He hosted Koko ga Hen da yo Nihonjin (English translation, This doesn't make sense, Japanese people!)

Kitano played a similarly named character in the controversial 2000 Japanese blockbuster Battle Royale, which takes place in a future in which a group of teenagers are randomly selected each year to eliminate each other on a deserted island.

[15] Dolls in 2002 had Kitano directing but not starring in a romantic drama with three different stories about undying love, and was loosely based on a bunraku play.

With a new take on the character from Shintaro Katsu's long-running film and TV series, Zatōichi was Kitano's biggest box office success in Japan,[15] did quite well in limited release across the world, and won countless awards at home and abroad, including the Silver Lion award at the Venice Film Festival.

Also in 2007, Kitano appeared in To Each His Own Cinema as the projectionist (in the segment "Rencontre unique") as Beat Takeshi, and in the TV movie Wada Akiko Satsujin Jiken.

In 2010, the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain in Paris held a one-man show displaying his paintings and installations.

On 10 August 2013, in an interview reported by John Bleasdale, Kitano revealed his current plans for a sequel to Outrage Beyond and an untitled personal film project.

"[citation needed] In September 2015, it was announced that Kitano would be contributing his voice and likeness to the character Toru Hirose in the SEGA video game Yakuza 6: The Song of Life.

Takeshi co-starred in the live action adaptation of the manga Ghost in the Shell, marking his return to American cinema nearly twenty years after Johnny Mnemonic in 1995.

[24] Although he has expressed his dislike of anime and manga in the past, he accepted the role because "even though this stylish piece of entertainment is totally different from the films I've directed, I thought it was interesting that Aramaki, the role I play, is a character who gives off a peculiar vibe and, in various episodes, is set at the core of the characters' relationships.

[31] On the 29th of April 2022 he received the Golden Mulberry Lifetime Achievement Award at the 24th Far East International Film Festival of Udine 2022, in Italy.