Steven Seagal

Steven Seagal: The Real Thing, and Everything After

*Above the Law* arrived in 1988 and did something no American film had done: it staged its fights in aikido. The wrist locks and circular throws were not choreography borrowed from Hong Kong or Hollywood stunt teams; they were the working vocabulary of a man who had spent years running a dojo in Osaka. Michael Ovitz, then the most powerful agent in the business, had taken aikido classes, decided the instructor was a movie star, paid for the screen test himself and got him a Warner Bros. contract. For a few years, the pitch was accurate. What happened over the following three decades is a different story, and a harder one.

Lansing to Osaka

Steven Frederic Seagal was born on 10 April 1952 in Lansing, Michigan, to Patricia Anne Fisher, a medical technician, and Samuel Seagal, a mathematics teacher whose family had emigrated from Russia. The family moved to Fullerton, California when he was five; his mother recalled a "puny kid" with asthma who "really thrived after" the move. He attended Buena Park High School and Fullerton College in 1970–71.

The martial arts came first and early. According to *Aikido Journal*, he studied karate under Fumio Demura before taking up aikido at the Orange County Aikikai under Harry Ishisaka in the late 1960s or early 1970s, and received his first dan from Koichi Tohei in the summer of 1974. He went to Japan that October, marrying Miyako Fujitani — a second-dan black belt and the daughter of an Osaka aikido master — in December.

The Dojo, and the Disputed Record

What is not in dispute is that Seagal ran the Tenshin dojo in Osaka on behalf of his father-in-law, becoming the first Westerner to direct an aikido school in Japan. Almost everything around that fact is contested. Wikipedia records him at 7th dan and shihan in Aikikai aikido; *Aikido Journal* lists him at 6th dan and notes he "was rapidly promoted to 5th dan in consideration of his position as chief instructor of the dojo." Fujitani has said his 1978 black belt was awarded because "the judge, who was famous for his laziness, fell asleep during Steven's presentation." He has claimed to have studied under aikido's founder Morihei Ueshiba, who died in 1969, when Seagal was seventeen and five years before he moved to Japan. He has been described, on the strength of such claims, as a pathological liar.

He and Fujitani had two children, Kentaro and the actress and writer Ayako Fujitani.

The Warner Bros. Years

*Above the Law* took nearly $19 million domestically. Roger Ebert observed drily that it "contains 50 percent more plot than it needs." *Hard to Kill* (1990), *Marked for Death* (1990) and *Out for Justice* (1991) followed and all made money. *Under Siege* (1992), reuniting him with director Andrew Davis, was the peak: a genuinely well-made action thriller, 83% on Rotten Tomatoes, whose critical consensus contains its own epitaph — "a high point for early '90s action, and its star's spotty filmography." He was paid $15 million for the 1995 sequel.

He hosted *Saturday Night Live* on 20 April 1991, an appearance that has entered legend for the wrong reasons: cast members David Spade and Tim Meadows called him the worst host in the show's history, citing his humourlessness and his treatment of the writers. Lorne Michaels never asked him back, and said so on air years later.

*On Deadly Ground* (1994), his directorial debut, made his environmental and spiritual preoccupations explicit and won him the Golden Raspberry for Worst Director. His co-star Morris Chestnut described the shoot's method with some precision: "The only time they really stuck to the script... was the stuff when he really wasn't there."

The Long Descent

*Exit Wounds* (2001) grossed nearly $80 million and was effectively the end of the theatrical career. From there it was direct-to-video, dozens of titles, many of them self-produced, with the exceptions rare enough to name — Robert Rodriguez's *Machete* (2010), where he played the villain. Critics noted a pattern of top billing attached to modest screen time. He led the A&E reality series *Steven Seagal: Lawman* from 2009, documenting his work as a reserve deputy in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana and later Maricopa County, Arizona, and the self-produced *True Justice* (2011–12).

Alongside this ran a parallel life: a serious blues guitar habit, two albums — *Songs from the Crystal Cave* (2004), which features Stevie Wonder, and *Mojo Priest* (2006) — and a guitar collection with instruments once owned by B.B. King, Muddy Waters and Jimi Hendrix. AllMusic's Thom Jurek was unimpressed, writing that Seagal's playing "rarely rises above bar band pedigree." In February 1997 Lama Penor Rinpoche of Palyul monastery recognised him as a tulku, the reincarnation of the seventeenth-century Nyingma treasure-revealer Chungdrag Dorje.

Moscow

Seagal now holds American, Serbian and Russian citizenship — Serbian from January 2016, Russian from November 2016, which the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov attributed to Seagal "asking quite insistently and over a lengthy period." He has called Vladimir Putin "one of the great living world leaders," said he "would like to consider him as a brother," supported the annexation of Crimea and appeared at a Night Wolves event in Sevastopol in August 2014. Ukraine banned him from entry, saying he had "committed socially dangerous actions." In 2018 Russia appointed him a special envoy to the United States; in February 2023 Putin awarded him the Order of Friendship.

Allegations, and the Courts

Multiple women have accused Seagal of sexual harassment or assault, in incidents dated from 1991 onward, among them Portia de Rossi, Rachel Grant and Regina Simons. Seagal has denied the allegations. In 1991, two Warner Bros. employees received out-of-court settlements of around $50,000 each. In September 2018 Los Angeles prosecutors declined to charge him over Simons's accusation because the statute of limitations had expired; Grant's case was declined on the same basis two months later.

Separately, he testified for the prosecution in a 2003 federal case in which Gambino family members were convicted of extortion after his former producing partner Julius Nasso enlisted them against him; Nasso pleaded guilty to extortion conspiracy. Several stunt performers have accused him of striking them on set, claims he has disputed.

Why Steven Is Called a Genius

He is not, nobody serious has said so, and this is the weakest case of any figure to whom the label gets attached. But the claim is not built on nothing, and it is worth naming what it was built on before dismantling it.

In 1988 Seagal possessed one authentic and unusual thing: a functional command of a real martial art, learned in Japan, deployed on camera without doubles or wire work. Aikido's principle is redirection rather than force — using an attacker's momentum against him — and it looks unlike any other screen fighting, which is exactly why *Above the Law* felt new. Running the Tenshin dojo as the first Westerner to do so in Japan is a genuine achievement in a discipline that does not hand those out casually.

That is where it stops. His acting is famously affectless; his direction won a Razzie; his guitar playing was assessed by a professional critic as bar-band standard; and his own account of his credentials includes a claim to have trained under a man who died when Seagal was seventeen. The gap between the skill he actually had and the biography he narrated around it is the defining feature of his public life. Call him a legitimately accomplished martial artist who became a movie star on the strength of it. The word "genius" belongs nowhere near him, and the reasons why are documented at length.

Legacy

He changed what a fight scene could look like, once, in 1988, and the influence is real: aikido had never been the grammar of an American action picture before. What followed is a case study in how a single authentic gift can be spent — on hundreds of interchangeable direct-to-video titles, on a Kremlin envoy's passport, on claims the record does not support. The films at the beginning still work. Very little after them does.

Achievements

• Order of Friendship — 2023
• Notable work: Under Siege
• Worked as film actor, actor and film director