Tatsuya Nakadai, a veteran Japanese actor best known for films such as Ran, High and Low and Harakiri, died on Saturday at the age of 92. His collaborations with some of the greatest directors in Japan cemented him as an icon of the "Golden Age" of Japanese cinema.
He died from pneumonia, according to a statement from Mumeijuku, the acting school and theater company that Nakadai founded.
Nakadai began his career as a theater actor, and remained committed to the stage throughout his life — in part because, unlike many actors at the time, he declined to sign an exclusive contract with a film studio. Doing so also gave him freedom to take on different roles — in samurai epics, realist dramas, crime thrillers, and even science fiction — and work with many different directors over the course of his career.
After a brief cameo in Akira Kurosawa's 1954 movie Seven Samurai, the film that also happens to be the actor's most revered internationally, he played the lead in Masaki Kobayashi's trilogy The Human Condition (1959–1961). The series stars Nakadai as a pacifist soldier in World War II-era Japan.
He credited much of his success to Kobayashi, whom he regarded as a mentor. "While I'm greatly indebted to Kurosawa," he told the Criterion Channel in an interview translated to English, "the director who discovered me and made me into the working actor that I am today was Masaki Kobayashi."
While filming The Human Condition, which took around four years to complete, Nakadai continued to work with Kurosawa. He starred alongside Toshiro Mifune, another legend of Japanese cinema, in Yojimbo in 1961 and High and Low in 1963.
With Harakiri, Nakadai's partnership with Kobayashi came to 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 storytelling voice to play the character as he narrates 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 "drama of dialogue," which allowed him to apply what he'd learned on the stage to his performance on screen. No surprise, then, that the actor, who considered theater acting his primary profession, favored Harakiri above all his other films.
Perhaps his most famous role came in 1985 with Kurosawa's last epic, Ran, loosely based on King Lear. Although he was only in his fifties, Nakadai starred as the aging warlord Hidetora Ichimonji, donning heavy makeup in order to fully embody the character.
The plentiful opportunities that Nakadai enjoyed as an actor came with a great deal of pressure. "For me, my twenties were like climbing Mount Fuji with a heavy load on my back, huffing and puffing," he said in 2005. "It felt like I was climbing, and the heavy load was everyone's masterpieces."
The "heavy load" he bore as a significant contributor to the growth of Japanese cinema has not been overlooked in Japan. In 1996, he was awarded Japan's Medal with Purple Ribbon, honoring those with achievements in arts and academics, and in 2015, the emperor granted him the Order of Culture, the highest honor bestowed upon citizens with major achievements in the arts and sciences.
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