This month, the Cinema Rediscovered festival in Bristol will screen a rarely seen film from 1919 that offers a glimpse of the early career of a Japanese Hollywood star. Sessue Hayakawa, Oscar-nominated for playing the tyrannical Colonel Saito in David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai in 1957, was a matinee idol back in the silent era. In fact he was one of the film industry’s first sex symbols, with a legion of female fans and a complex star persona that reflected America’s deep-seated prejudices about, and fascination with, Japanese culture. These ideas would make themselves painfully obvious throughout his career, which spanned six decades.

The Dragon Painter, from 1919, was made by Hayakawa’s own production company, and co-stars his wife, Tsuru Aoki. It is unusual among his American films for being set entirely in Japan, with Japanese characters – a break from the villain casting that held Hayakawa back in Hollywood.

The star was born Kintarō Hayakawa in the Chiba prefecture of Japan in 1886. He intended to join the navy, but he was expelled from the academy after he was injured in a diving accident. Hayakawa recalled in his 1960 memoir Zen Showed Me the Way that he attempted suicide as a result – but was saved by his dog, who raised the alarm.

After his recovery he moved to Los Angeles, where he began acting at the Japanese theatre under his stage name Sessue Hayakawa. Aoki saw him on stage in a play called The Typhoon, and brought film producer Thomas Ince to see him, who was impressed enough to put a film adaptation in the works.

The Typhoon (Reginald Barker, 1914) was a hit, as were the next two films Hayakawa made. But his breakthrough came in a sensationalist, but sophisticated silent classic: Cecil B DeMille’s violent melodrama The Cheat (1915). This film, impossible to forget if you have ever seen it, casts Hayakawa as a villainous art dealer who lends a society lady money to cover her debts, with sexual favours as payment. He refuses to be paid off with cash and, after a vicious struggle, he brands her flesh as a mark of ownership. The film became a phenomenon, and Hayakawa’s fame escalated – not just in the US but in Europe and Japan.

His brooding good looks made him a new kind of leading man, one who played dangerously domineering characters, with a background that the fan magazines found alluringly exotic. He was the studio’s first choice for the leading man in The Sheik, the aggressively sexual role that in the end made Rudolph Valentino’s name.

His performance style, which was much more restrained than that of his American peers, made his appearances all the more memorable. DeMille joked: “I don’t understand it; it is new and strange, but it is the greatest thing I ever saw.”

He made several more films, but he was increasingly typecast in a generic east Asian ethnicity, playing characters who were either “heavies” or who sacrifice themselves in the name of assimilation. The praise heaped on his acting always carried a burden of orientalist caricature, even while studio publicity emphasised his supposed American-ness, pointing to his muscular physique, fashion sense and even his English bulldog as evidence. In 1917 he formed a production company, Haworth, to make films that “reveal [Japanese people] as we really are”.

The Dragon Painter, made in 1919 as one of the company’s “superior pictures”, was publicised as having real Japanese settings and characters, with an “authentic” atmosphere. In fact, the film was based on a 1906 novel by the American Japanophile novelist Mary McNeil Fenollosa, and the picturesque landscapes were shot in Yosemite national park and in the Japanese tea garden in Coronado, California. It is beautiful, though artificial.

However, it features a remarkably committed performance from Hayakawa as Tatsu, the title character, who believes his fiancee (Aoki) has been captured by a dragon. The real “authenticity” of the picture lies in the casting of amateur artist Hayakawa as a painter, and giving him the happy ending he craved. Hayakawa was a hands-on producer – in his memoir, he says that he directed all the scenes in which he appeared. The Dragon Painter, which is now screening in a vivid new restoration, was warmly received in the US on its first release, though the Japanese press criticised its infelicities.

Like the Chinese-American star Anna May Wong, in the 1920s Hayakawa left Hollywood for Europe in search of better roles, making films in France and Britain. When he returned to the US he made his talkie debut with 1931’s Daughter of the Dragon, opposite Wong. Alongside film work, mostly in France, he supported himself by painting watercolours. At the end of the 1940s, Humphrey Bogart’s people tracked him down to take a major role in the noir Tokyo Joe (1949), marking his real return to Hollywood.

The success of The Bridge on the River Kwai re-established Hayakawa’s reputation as one of the first greats of American screen acting, and perhaps the Oscar nomination reflected that renewed esteem. He retired in the mid-60s, devoting himself to Zen Buddhism after a career of great highs and many disappointing lows. As he wrote in his memoir: “I have played the villain too many times … just for once, I would like to play the hero.”

• In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org

• The Dragon Painter (William Worthington, 1919) screens at Cinema Rediscovered in Bristol on Saturday 27 July. The Cinema Rediscovered festival runs from 24-28 July