Tatsuya Nakadai, one of Japan’s most prominent stage and film actors, who frequently collaborated with director Masaki Kobayashi and helmed Akira Kurosawa’s works such as “Ran,” “Kagemusha,” and “High and Low,” has passed away. He was 92 years old.
Nakadai’s death was reported in Japan by Japan News on Tuesday.
With more than 100 screen credits over a seven-decade career, Nakadai’s body of work spanned the true figures of late 20th century Japanese cinema, collaborating with filmmakers such as Hiroshi Teshigahara, Mikio Naruse, and Kon Ichikawa. He considered himself primarily a theater actor and never had an overall contract with a Japanese studio, leaving him free to work with many different directors.
One of his first major on-screen jobs was an uncredited prisoner role in Kobayashi’s 1953 drama The Thick-Walled Room, beginning a partnership that would last three decades and include titles such as Samurai Rebellion and Kaidan.
To Western audiences, Nakadai is perhaps best known for his starring role in Kurosawa’s 1985 drama Ran. This drama is a war epic set in the Sengoku period, inspired by Shakespeare’s King Lear, for which Kurosawa was the only director nominated for an Oscar. Then, Nakadai, just in his early 50s, played a much older role, wearing heavy, ghostly makeup to play a run-down, world-weary warlord.
Nakadai was a fixture in the chanbara genre, leading some of the most enduring samurai films, including Kobayashi’s sublime existential Harakiri and Kihachi Okamoto’s more comedic Kill! He twice played the grinning villain to director Toshiro Mifune’s grimacing hero. He played a grinning, gun-toting gangster in 1961’s Yojimbo and a bald, prideful samurai in 1962’s Sanjuro, the latter ending in one of the most memorable and bloody death scenes of the era. Nakadai had his big break in director Kobayashi’s “The Human Condition” trilogy, in which he played a pacifist who survives Japan’s transition to totalitarian rule during World War II.
Mifune and Kurosawa would work together again in 1963’s epic kidnapping thriller “High and Low,” in which Nakadai played a detective chief who set up base camp in the luxury apartment of Mifune’s callous lead. In the late 1970s, director Kurosawa once again appointed Nakadai, this time for the lead role in the historical drama blockbuster Kagemusha.
Nakadai continued to work as a film actor throughout the latter half of his life. He was a voice actor in 2013’s “The Tale of the Princess Kaguya,” and rejoined the long-running “Zatoichi” series in the 2010 revival of “Zatoichi: The Last.” But Nakadai considered himself a theater actor first and foremost, and his most acclaimed work in his later years was on stage, starring in Death of a Salesman, Barrymore, and Don Quixote. He played Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and Richard III throughout his career.
Motohisa Nakadai was born in Tokyo on December 13, 1932, the second of four children. Nakadai grew up in Chiba, where his father worked as a bus driver until his death in 1941. Later, his mother moved the family to Aoyama. As a young man, he began to pursue acting as a student at the Haiyuza Training School.
Nakadai has won Japan’s Blue Ribbon Award twice, first in 1962 for “Harakiri” and second in 1980 for “Kagemusha” and “The Battle of Port Arthur.” In 2015, he received Japan’s highest honor, the Order of Culture, for his contributions to the arts and sciences.
Nakadai was preceded in death by his wife, producer and playwright Kyoko Miyazaki. What is left behind is her daughter Nao Nakadai.
