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Tatsuya Nakadai, one of Japan’s most celebrated stage and screen actors who was a frequent collaborator of director Masaki Kobayashi and led Akira Kurosawa titles such as “Ran,” “Kagemusha” and “High and Low,” has died. He was 92.
Nakadai’s death was reported Tuesday in Japan by The Japan News.
With more than 100 screen credits through his seven-decade-spanning career, Nakadai’s body of work spanned a veritable who’s-who of Japanese cinema for the second half of the twentieth century, working with filmmakers like Hiroshi Teshigahara, Mikio Naruse and Kon Ichikawa. He considered himself primarily a theater actor, and he never signed an overall contract with any Japanese studio, leaving him free to work with many different directors.
One of his first major on-screen jobs was an uncredited role playing a prisoner in Kobayashi’s 1953 drama “The Thick-Walled Room,” beginning a partnership that would continue through the next three decades and include titles like “Samurai Rebellion” and “Kwaidan.”
To Western audiences, Nakadai is perhaps best known for his leading turn in Kurosawa’s 1985 drama “Ran,” a Sengoku-period-set war epic inspired by Shakespeare’s “King Lear” that earned Kurosawa his only directing Oscar nomination. Then, just in his early 50s, Nakadai played much older, wearing intense, ghost-like makeup to portray a desolate, world-weary warlord.
Nakadai was a fixture of the chanbara genre, leading some of the most enduring samurai films, including Kobayashi’s sublimely existential “Harakiri” and Kihachi Okamoto’s more comedic “Kill!” He played the grinning villain to Toshiro Mifune’s scowling hero twice — as a grinning, gun-toting gangster in 1961’s “Yojimbo” and a balder and more prideful samurai foil in 1962’s “Sanjuro,” the latter of which ended with one of the era’s most memorably bloody death scenes. Nakadai had been coming off a breakout lead turn in Kobayashi’s “The Human Condition” trilogy, in which the actor played a pacifist enduring Japan’s turn to totalitarian rule amid World War II.
Mifune and Kurosawa would collaborate again on the sprawling 1963 kidnap thriller “High and Low,” in which Nakadai played the chief detective who sets up base camp in the luxurious apartment of Mifune’s callous lead. In the late ’70s, Kurosawa tapped Nakadai again, this time to lead the jidaigeki epic “Kagemusha.”
Nakadai continued screen-acting through the second half of his life. He was a voice actor on the 2013 “The Tale of the Princess Kaguya” and even looped back to the long-running Zatoichi franchise with the 2010 revival “Zatoichi: The Last.” But Nakadai considered himself to be a theater actor first, and the most acclaimed work of his later years came onstage, leading productions of “Death of a Salesman,” “Barrymore” and “Don Quixote.” He played Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello and Richard III throughout his career.
Motohisa Nakadai was born Dec. 13, 1932, in Tokyo, the second of four siblings. Nakadai was raised in Chiba, where his father worked as a bus driver until his death in 1941. His mother then moved them to Aoyama. In young adulthood, he began to pursue acting as a student at the Haiyuza Training School.
Nakadai won two of Japan’s Blue Ribbon Awards, the first for “Harakiri” in 1962 and the second for “Kagemusha” and “The Battle of Port Arthur” in 1980. In 2015, he received the Order of Culture, Japan’s highest honor for contributions to the arts and sciences.
Nakadai was predeceased by his wife, producer and playwright Kyoko Miyazaki. He is survived by their daughter, Nao Nakadai.
