Tatsuya Nakadai, Japanese actor of Ran, Yojimbo and Harakiri, dies aged 92 | Movies
Japanese theater and film actor Tatsuya Nakadai, who symbolized the golden age of the country’s cinema with his famous performances, passed away at the age of 92.
Nakadai has earned more than 100 feature credits throughout his career spanning seven decades; but he is perhaps best known internationally for his role in Akira Kurosawa’s 1985 epic Ran, set in the Sengoku “warring states” period, inspired by Shakespeare’s King Lear.
The film, in which Nakadai played the warlord Hidetora Ichimonji, earned Kurosawa his only Oscar nomination for best director.
Nakadai died of pneumonia in a Tokyo hospital on Saturday, Kyodo news agency reported Tuesday, citing sources close to the actor.
Although he says he prefers stage acting and refuses to contractually bind himself to a specific film studio so that he can work with a variety of directors, Nakadai Canbara “Sword fighting” roles in films with strong samurai themes.
appeared in 1962 jidaigeki period drama Harakiri – one of the highlights of his long and successful artistic collaboration with director Masaki Kobayashi, which also earned him major roles in Samurai Revolt and Kwaidan.
He appeared in Kurosawa’s 1980 film Kagemusha; It tells the story of a thief hired to impersonate a dying samurai warlord, which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival the same year.
But Nakadai owed much of his success to Kobayashi, who cast him as the lead in the Human Condition trilogy (1959-1961), in which he played a pacifist-socialist trying to come to terms with Japan’s militaristic rule during World War II.
Nakadai’s talents arguably shone brightest in his scenes with Toshiro Mifune; In Kurosawa’s acclaimed 1963 crime film High and Low, he played Inspector Tokura, who investigates the kidnapping of the son of Mifune’s wealthy businessman Kingo Gondo. He also played Hanbei, alongside Mifune’s Sanjuro, in Kurosawa’s 1961 samurai film Yojimbo, which is considered one of the director’s greatest works.
A year later, Kurosawa reunited his leading actors in Sanjuro, the sequel to Yojimbo. The film famously ends with Sanjuro slashing through Hanbei’s torso at lightning speed and a sword fight. bloodfall – a graphic display of violence that shocked audiences at the time. Kurosawa later denied allegations that the blood geyser was caused by a faulty impeller. Whether it happened by accident or on purpose, the scene has had a lasting impact on action movies and video games.
Born in 1932 to a working-class family in Chiba, east of Tokyo, Nakadai decided to take up acting as an alternative to prohibitively expensive university education by enrolling in acting school in the early 1950s.
One of his first major roles in film – reportedly resulting from a chance encounter with Kobayashi while Nakadai was working as a shop assistant in Tokyo – was as an uncredited prisoner in Kobayashi’s 1953 war drama The Thick-Walled Room; this was the beginning of a partnership that would last thirty years.
In his later life, Nakadai, who had stage works such as Death of a Salesman, Don Quixote, Hamlet and Macbeth, helped train young actors with his wife and fellow actor Yasuko Miyazaki, with whom he opened the Mumeijuku school in Tokyo in 1975.
In 2015, Nakadai was awarded the Order of Culture, Japan’s highest honor, by the emperor for his contributions to the arts and sciences. Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper reported that Nakadai appeared on stage as recently as this year.
