Actor Tatsuya Nakadai has died. He starred in classics like ‘Ran’ and ‘Harakiri’ : NPR
Japanese actor Tatsuya Nakadai in 2019. Nakadai died at the age of 92 over the weekend.
STR/JIJI Press/AFP via Getty Images
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Tatsuya Nakadai, a veteran Japanese actor best known for films such as Ran, up and down And Hara-kiridied Saturday at the age of 92. His collaborations with some of Japan’s greatest directors made him an icon of the “golden age” of Japanese cinema.
He died of pneumonia, according to a statement from Mumeijuku, the drama school and theater company founded by Nakadai.
Nakadai began his career as a stage actor and remained engaged on stage throughout his life, in part because, unlike many actors of the era, he refused to sign an exclusive contract with a film studio. It also gave him the freedom to take on different roles – in samurai epics, realistic dramas, crime thrillers and even science fiction – and to work with many different directors over the course of his career.
After a brief appearance in Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 film Seven samuraithe film which also happens to be the actor’s most internationally revered film, he played the lead role in Masaki Kobayashi’s trilogy The human condition (1959-1961). The series stars Nakadai as a pacifist soldier in World War II Japan.
He attributes much of his success to Kobayashi, whom he considers a mentor. “Although I am greatly indebted to Kurosawa,” he told the Criterion Channel in an interview translated into English, “the director who discovered me and made me the actor I am today was Masaki Kobayashi.”
During filming The human condition, which lasted about four years, Nakadai continued to work with Kurosawa. He plays alongside Toshiro Mifune, another legend of Japanese cinema, in Yojimbo in 1961 and Top and bottom in 1963.
With Hara-kiriNakadai’s partnership with Kobayashi reaches a crescendo. The 1962 film stars Nakadai as a lone samurai asking a local lord for permission to commit harakiri, a form of ritual suicide. The actor used a stylized voice to portray the character as he recounts the events that led to his downfall, evoking kabuki, a form of traditional Japanese theater. In a 2005 interview, Nakadai described the film as a “dialogue drama”, which allowed him to apply what he learned on stage to his on-screen performance. It is therefore not surprising that the actor, who considered the theater his main profession, favored Hara-kiri especially his other films.
Perhaps his most famous role came in 1985 with Kurosawa’s latest epic, Ranloosely based on King Lear. Although only in his fifties, Nakadai played the role of the aging warlord Hidetora Ichimonji, wearing heavy makeup in order to fully embody the character.
The many opportunities Nakadai enjoyed as an actor came with great pressure. “For me, my twenties were like climbing Mount Fuji with a heavy load on my back, huffing and puffing,” he said in 2005. “I felt like I was climbing, and that heavy load was everyone’s masterpiece.”
The “heavy burden” he bore as a significant contributor to the growth of Japanese cinema was not overlooked in Japan. In 1996, he received the Japanese Medal with Purple Ribbon, honoring those who have achieved artistic and academic achievements, and in 2015, the emperor awarded him the Order of Culture, the highest honor given to citizens with major achievements in the arts and sciences.
