Tatsuya Nakadai, beloved star of Japan’s golden age of cinema and a frequent collaborator of legendary filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, has died aged 92.
The actor, who rose to fame working with Japanese filmmaker Masaki Kobayashi, died from pneumonia in a hospital in Tokyo on Saturday, November 8, according to a Japanese news agency who cited sources close to the late performer, The Guardian reports.
Nakadai had over 100 screen credits to his resume, which made up a long and varied career that lasted over 70 years. Internationally, though, he is probably best known for his work in Kurosawa’s 1985 film Ran, an epic modeled after Shakespeare’s King Lear set in the Sengoku “warning states” period. Nakadai played a warlord named Hidetora Ichimonji in the project, which helped the filmmaker cinch his one and only Academy Award nomination for best director.
Nakadai was well-known for working in films that featured samurai themes and for working with the chanbara sword-fighting style in those projects. Despite his recognition for his work with Kurosawa, it could be said that Nakadai’s success in the field was fostered by Kobayashi. The filmmaker cast him in the lead role in his legendary The Human Condition trilogy of films, which ran from 1959 to 1961, in the earlier days of Nakadai’s career. Before that, though, he was cast as a prisoner in an uncredited role for Kobayashi’s 1953 war drama The Thick-Walled Room, which was the true start of their decades-long collaboration.
The actor was born east of Tokyo, in Chiba, to a working class family in 1932. In the early 1950s, he decided to pursue acting instead of taking on debt to further his education at an expensive university. He preferred the stage to the screen despite his vibrant film career, and had epic plays such as Death of a Salesman, Hamlet, Don Quixote, and Macbeth as part of his resume over the years.
In 1975, he and his wife Yasuko Miyazaki opened the Mumeijuku school for young actors in Tokyo. In 2015, Nakadai was awarded the Order of Culture, which is Japan’s highest honor for contributions to the arts, by the emperor. Needless to say, he will be sorely missed, and his important work will be remembered for years to come.
Lex Briscuso is a film and television critic and a freelance entertainment writer for IGN. You can follow her on Twitter at @nikonamerica.
