Toshiro Mifune and Tatsuya Nakadai in Yojimbo (1961)
Chinese postcard. Toshiro Mifune and Tatsuya Nakadai (left) in Yojimbo (Akira Kurosawa, 1961).
On 8 November 2025, Japanese actor Tatsuya Nakadai (1932-2025) passed away at the age of 92. He was a star actor in films by Akira Kurosawa and Masaki Kobayashi. He was top-billed in a double role in Kurosawa's epic Kagemusha (1980) and played the dying king, modelled on Lear, in Ran (Kurosawa, 1985). In his over seven-decade career, he appeared in more than 160 films and received numerous accolades.
Tatsuya Nakadai was born Motohisa Nakadai in 1932 in Tokyo, in the Japanese Empire. His father worked as a bus driver, and after he died in 1941, the family moved to Aoyama. He had no university education or training as an actor. Tall and handsome Nakadai was working as a shop assistant in Tokyo when fledging Shochiku Studios director Masaki Kobayashi discovered him by chance and gave him a small, uncredited role in Kabe atsuki heya / The Thick-Walled Room (Masaki Kobayashi, 1953-1956). The release of the film was delayed for three years due to its controversial subject matter. Around the same time, Nakadai played an uncredited samurai in Shichinin no samurai / The Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954). Reportedly, director Kurosawa spent more than 5 minutes lecturing on how to walk correctly as a wandering samurai for an appearance that totals about 4 seconds in duration. After the embarrassing grilling by Kurosawa, the then 19-year-old Nakadai decided to work very hard on his acting skills so as to be able to reject any future offer by the director. His official acting debut was in Hi no tori / Phoenix (Umetsugu Inoue, 1956). Soon followed roles in Kuroi kawa / Black River (Masaki Kobayashi, 1957), Arakure / Untamed (Mikio Naruse, 1957), Enjo / Conflagration (Kon Ichikawa, 1958), Hadaka no taiyo / Naked Sun (Miyoji Ieki, 1958), Kagi / The Key / Odd Obsession (Kon Ichikawa, 1959). Nakadai had his breakthrough in Masaki Kobayashi's epic anti-war trilogy Ningen no jōken / The Human Condition (1959–1961), based on the novel of the same name by Junpei Gomikawa. The trilogy, subtitled No Greater Love (1959), Road to Eternity (1959), and A Soldier's Prayer (1961), follows the life of Kaji, a Japanese pacifist and socialist, as he tries to survive in the totalitarian and oppressive world of World War II-era Japan. In the same period, Nakadai appeared in several films by Mikio Naruse, including Onna ga kaidan o noboru toki / When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (Mikio Naruse, 1960), Musume tsuma haha / Daughters, Wives and a Mother (Mikio Naruse, 1960), Tsuma to shite onna to shite / As a Wife, As a Woman (Mikio Naruse, 1960). Tatsuya Nakadai was top-billed in Aoi yaju / The Blue Beast (Hiromichi Horikawa, 1960),
By 1960, Tatsuya Nakadai had more than twenty feature films on his Shochiku résumé. He next played Unosuke, Toshiro Mifune's formidable gun-wielding opponent in the classic Yojimbo (Akira Kurosawa, 1961). That same year, he starred in the Oscar-nominated Eien no hito / Immortal Love / Bitter Spirit (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1961). He reunited with Kurosawa for the sequel to Yojimbo, Tsubaki Sanjuro / Sanjuro (Akira Kurosawa, 1961), and the kidnapping thriller Tengoku to jigoku / High and Low (Akira Kurosawa, 1963), in which he played the police inspector. With Kobayashi, he made Karami-ai / The Inheritance (Kobayashi, 1962). He won the Blue Ribbon Award for Best Actor for his performance as the ageing and vengeful ronin in Seppuku / Harakiri (Masaki Kobayashi, 1962), a role he considered his finest. He played a samurai in his 50s while he was 33. His other notable credits of the 1960s included Dai-bosatsu Toge / The Sword of Doom (Kihachi Okamoto, 1966), Tanin no kao / The Face of Another (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1966), and the comedy Kiru / Kill! (Kihachi Okamoto, 1968) and Goyokin / Official Gold (Hideo Gosha, 1969). In Italy, he acted in the Spaghetti Western Oggi a me… domani a te / Today We Kill… Tomorrow We Die (Tonino Cervi, 1968) with Brett Halsey and Bud Spencer. It was the directorial debut of Tonino Cervi, who co-wrote the film with Dario Argento.
A lifelong stage actor, Tatsuya Nakadai founded the acting school Mumeijuku with his wife Yasuko Miyazaki in 1975. He continued performing on stage into his nineties. His films of the 1970s include Inochi bonifuro / Inn of Evil (Masaki Kobayashi, 1971), the crime film Shussho iwai / The Wolves (Hideo Gosha, 1971), Fumo chitai / Barren Zone (Satsuo Yamamoto, 1976), and Ni hyaku san kochi / The Battle of Port Arthur (Toshio Masuda, 1980). Nakadai appeared in two more Kurosawa films in the 1980s. In the epic Kagemusha / Shadow Warrior (Akira Kurosawa, 1980), Nakadai plays both the titular thief turned body-double and the famous daimyō Takeda Shingen, whom the thief is tasked with impersonating. This dual role helped him win his second Blue Ribbon Award for Best Actor. The film won the Palme d'Or at the 1980 Cannes Film Festival (tied with All That Jazz). It was also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and received other honours. In the historical epic Ran (Akira Kurosawa, 1985), Nakadai plays another daimyō, Hidetora Ichimonji, an ageing Sengoku-period warlord who decides to abdicate as ruler in favour of his three sons. The role is loosely based on King Lear from Shakespeare's play 'King Lear' and inspired by the historical daimyō Mōri Motonari. Nakadai also appeared in the British war film Return from the River Kwai (Andrew V. McLaglen, 1988) about POWs of the Japanese in World War II and starring Edward Fox and Denholm Elliott
Tatsuya Nakadai co-starred with Jacky Cheung in the Science Fiction film Yiu sau dou sih / The Wicked City (Peter Mak alias Mak Tai-kit, 1992). It is a live-action film adaptation of the Japanese anime of the same name, which in turn is based on the first novel of the series of the same name by Hideyuki Kikuchi. The film was produced by Tsui Hark, who actually directed many scenes himself. Remarkable is also the Japanese Western East Meets West (Kihachi Okamoto, 1995). With Okamoto, he made many films, including Sukedachiya Sukeroku / Vengeance for Sale (Kihachi Okamoto, 2002). He also appeared in the project left behind by Kurosawa, Ame agaru / After the Rain (Takashi Koizumi, 1999). His final films included Otoko-tachi no Yamato / Yamato (Junya Sato, 2005), Haru to no tabi / Haru’s Journey (Masahiro Kobayashi, 2010), Jinrui shikin / Human Trust (Junji Sakamoto, 2013), Umibe no ria /Lear on the Shore (Masahiro Kobayashi, 2017) and Kikyo / Kikyo – The Return (Shigemichi Sugita, 2019). In 1996, he received the Medal with Purple Ribbon, and in 2015, he received the Order of Culture. His final stage performance was in May 2025 in Noto, Ishikawa, as part of a stage tour. Nakadai died from pneumonia in a Tokyo hospital on 8 November 2025, at the age of 92. His daughter was at his side at the time of his death. His death was disclosed three days later, on 11 November.
Sources: Chuck Stephens (In Focus), Hans Beerekamp (Het Schimmenrijk - Dutch), Wikipedia and IMDb.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
Toshiro Mifune and Tatsuya Nakadai in Yojimbo (1961)
Chinese postcard. Toshiro Mifune and Tatsuya Nakadai (left) in Yojimbo (Akira Kurosawa, 1961).
On 8 November 2025, Japanese actor Tatsuya Nakadai (1932-2025) passed away at the age of 92. He was a star actor in films by Akira Kurosawa and Masaki Kobayashi. He was top-billed in a double role in Kurosawa's epic Kagemusha (1980) and played the dying king, modelled on Lear, in Ran (Kurosawa, 1985). In his over seven-decade career, he appeared in more than 160 films and received numerous accolades.
Tatsuya Nakadai was born Motohisa Nakadai in 1932 in Tokyo, in the Japanese Empire. His father worked as a bus driver, and after he died in 1941, the family moved to Aoyama. He had no university education or training as an actor. Tall and handsome Nakadai was working as a shop assistant in Tokyo when fledging Shochiku Studios director Masaki Kobayashi discovered him by chance and gave him a small, uncredited role in Kabe atsuki heya / The Thick-Walled Room (Masaki Kobayashi, 1953-1956). The release of the film was delayed for three years due to its controversial subject matter. Around the same time, Nakadai played an uncredited samurai in Shichinin no samurai / The Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954). Reportedly, director Kurosawa spent more than 5 minutes lecturing on how to walk correctly as a wandering samurai for an appearance that totals about 4 seconds in duration. After the embarrassing grilling by Kurosawa, the then 19-year-old Nakadai decided to work very hard on his acting skills so as to be able to reject any future offer by the director. His official acting debut was in Hi no tori / Phoenix (Umetsugu Inoue, 1956). Soon followed roles in Kuroi kawa / Black River (Masaki Kobayashi, 1957), Arakure / Untamed (Mikio Naruse, 1957), Enjo / Conflagration (Kon Ichikawa, 1958), Hadaka no taiyo / Naked Sun (Miyoji Ieki, 1958), Kagi / The Key / Odd Obsession (Kon Ichikawa, 1959). Nakadai had his breakthrough in Masaki Kobayashi's epic anti-war trilogy Ningen no jōken / The Human Condition (1959–1961), based on the novel of the same name by Junpei Gomikawa. The trilogy, subtitled No Greater Love (1959), Road to Eternity (1959), and A Soldier's Prayer (1961), follows the life of Kaji, a Japanese pacifist and socialist, as he tries to survive in the totalitarian and oppressive world of World War II-era Japan. In the same period, Nakadai appeared in several films by Mikio Naruse, including Onna ga kaidan o noboru toki / When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (Mikio Naruse, 1960), Musume tsuma haha / Daughters, Wives and a Mother (Mikio Naruse, 1960), Tsuma to shite onna to shite / As a Wife, As a Woman (Mikio Naruse, 1960). Tatsuya Nakadai was top-billed in Aoi yaju / The Blue Beast (Hiromichi Horikawa, 1960),
By 1960, Tatsuya Nakadai had more than twenty feature films on his Shochiku résumé. He next played Unosuke, Toshiro Mifune's formidable gun-wielding opponent in the classic Yojimbo (Akira Kurosawa, 1961). That same year, he starred in the Oscar-nominated Eien no hito / Immortal Love / Bitter Spirit (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1961). He reunited with Kurosawa for the sequel to Yojimbo, Tsubaki Sanjuro / Sanjuro (Akira Kurosawa, 1961), and the kidnapping thriller Tengoku to jigoku / High and Low (Akira Kurosawa, 1963), in which he played the police inspector. With Kobayashi, he made Karami-ai / The Inheritance (Kobayashi, 1962). He won the Blue Ribbon Award for Best Actor for his performance as the ageing and vengeful ronin in Seppuku / Harakiri (Masaki Kobayashi, 1962), a role he considered his finest. He played a samurai in his 50s while he was 33. His other notable credits of the 1960s included Dai-bosatsu Toge / The Sword of Doom (Kihachi Okamoto, 1966), Tanin no kao / The Face of Another (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1966), and the comedy Kiru / Kill! (Kihachi Okamoto, 1968) and Goyokin / Official Gold (Hideo Gosha, 1969). In Italy, he acted in the Spaghetti Western Oggi a me… domani a te / Today We Kill… Tomorrow We Die (Tonino Cervi, 1968) with Brett Halsey and Bud Spencer. It was the directorial debut of Tonino Cervi, who co-wrote the film with Dario Argento.
A lifelong stage actor, Tatsuya Nakadai founded the acting school Mumeijuku with his wife Yasuko Miyazaki in 1975. He continued performing on stage into his nineties. His films of the 1970s include Inochi bonifuro / Inn of Evil (Masaki Kobayashi, 1971), the crime film Shussho iwai / The Wolves (Hideo Gosha, 1971), Fumo chitai / Barren Zone (Satsuo Yamamoto, 1976), and Ni hyaku san kochi / The Battle of Port Arthur (Toshio Masuda, 1980). Nakadai appeared in two more Kurosawa films in the 1980s. In the epic Kagemusha / Shadow Warrior (Akira Kurosawa, 1980), Nakadai plays both the titular thief turned body-double and the famous daimyō Takeda Shingen, whom the thief is tasked with impersonating. This dual role helped him win his second Blue Ribbon Award for Best Actor. The film won the Palme d'Or at the 1980 Cannes Film Festival (tied with All That Jazz). It was also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and received other honours. In the historical epic Ran (Akira Kurosawa, 1985), Nakadai plays another daimyō, Hidetora Ichimonji, an ageing Sengoku-period warlord who decides to abdicate as ruler in favour of his three sons. The role is loosely based on King Lear from Shakespeare's play 'King Lear' and inspired by the historical daimyō Mōri Motonari. Nakadai also appeared in the British war film Return from the River Kwai (Andrew V. McLaglen, 1988) about POWs of the Japanese in World War II and starring Edward Fox and Denholm Elliott
Tatsuya Nakadai co-starred with Jacky Cheung in the Science Fiction film Yiu sau dou sih / The Wicked City (Peter Mak alias Mak Tai-kit, 1992). It is a live-action film adaptation of the Japanese anime of the same name, which in turn is based on the first novel of the series of the same name by Hideyuki Kikuchi. The film was produced by Tsui Hark, who actually directed many scenes himself. Remarkable is also the Japanese Western East Meets West (Kihachi Okamoto, 1995). With Okamoto, he made many films, including Sukedachiya Sukeroku / Vengeance for Sale (Kihachi Okamoto, 2002). He also appeared in the project left behind by Kurosawa, Ame agaru / After the Rain (Takashi Koizumi, 1999). His final films included Otoko-tachi no Yamato / Yamato (Junya Sato, 2005), Haru to no tabi / Haru’s Journey (Masahiro Kobayashi, 2010), Jinrui shikin / Human Trust (Junji Sakamoto, 2013), Umibe no ria /Lear on the Shore (Masahiro Kobayashi, 2017) and Kikyo / Kikyo – The Return (Shigemichi Sugita, 2019). In 1996, he received the Medal with Purple Ribbon, and in 2015, he received the Order of Culture. His final stage performance was in May 2025 in Noto, Ishikawa, as part of a stage tour. Nakadai died from pneumonia in a Tokyo hospital on 8 November 2025, at the age of 92. His daughter was at his side at the time of his death. His death was disclosed three days later, on 11 November.
Sources: Chuck Stephens (In Focus), Hans Beerekamp (Het Schimmenrijk - Dutch), Wikipedia and IMDb.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.