France. After the war, Hayakawa's on-screen roles can best be described as "the honorable villain", a figure exemplified by his portrayal of Colonel Saito in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). The film won the Academy Award for Best Picture and Hayakawa earned a nomination for the Best Supporting Actor; he was also nominated for a Golden Globe. He called the role the highlight of his career. After the film, Hayakawa largely retired from acting. Throughout the following years he performed guest appearances on a handful of television shows and films, making his final performance in the animated film The Daydreamer (1966). After retiring, Hayakawa dedicated himself to Zen Buddhism, became an ordained Zen master, worked as a private acting coach, and wrote his autobiography Zen Showed Me the Way. Racial barriers Throughout Hayakawa's career, many segments of American society were filled with feelings of anti-Japanese sentiment, partly from nationalism rising from World War I and World War II. Hayakawa was constantly typecast as a villain or forbidden lover and was unable to play parts that would be given to white actors such as Douglas Fairbanks. Hayakawa stated, "Such roles [in The Wrath of the Gods, The Typhoon, and The Cheat] are not true to our Japanese nature... They are false and give people a wrong idea of us. I wish to make a characterization which shall reveal us as we really are." In 1949, he lamented, "My one ambition is to play a hero". Hayakawa's dilemma was analogous to that of Rudolph Valentino, nine years his junior; both were foreign born, and were typecast as exotic or forbidden lovers. Although Hayakawa's contract with Famous Players expired in May 1918, the studio still asked him to star in The Sheik. Hayakawa refused in order to start his own company. With influence from June Mathis, the role went to the barely known Valentino, turning him into a screen icon overnight. Writing to the "What the Picture Did for Me" section of the Exhibitors Herald in March 1922, a theater owner in Denison, Iowa, with a population of about 3,500, revealed the mixed feelings about Hayakawa in middle America (and the language used to describe him): "The Jap is sure a good actor, but some people don't seem to like him." In 1930, the Production Code came into effect (enforced after 1934) which forbade portrayals of miscegenation in film. This meant