Tatsuya Nakadai, Japanese actor of Ran, Yojimbo and Harakiri, dies aged 92

"Nakadai garnered more than 100 screen credits during a career spanning seven decades, but is perhaps best known internationally for his role in Ran, Akira Kurosawa's 1985 epic set in the Sengoku warring states period that took its inspiration from Shakespeare's King Lear. The film, in which Nakadai played the warlord Hidetora Ichimonji, earned Kurosawa his only Oscar nomination for best director."

"While he professed to prefer stage acting and refused to contractually bind himself to a particular film studio so he could work with a variety of directors Nakadai is closely associated with chanbara sword-fighting roles in films with strong samurai themes. He appeared in the 1962 jidaigeki period drama Harakiri a highlight of a long and successful artistic collaboration with director Masaki Kobayashi that also brought him prominent roles in Samurai Rebellion and Kwaidan."

"He starred in Kurosawa's 1980 film Kagemusha the story of a thief who is hired to impersonate a dying samurai warlord that won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes film festival the same year. Nakadai, though, owed much of his success to Kobayashi, who cast him as the lead in The Human Condition trilogy (1959-1961), in which he played a pacifist-socialist struggling to come to terms with Japan's militarist rule during the second world war."

Tatsuya Nakadai was a Japanese stage and screen actor who died aged 92 from pneumonia in a Tokyo hospital. He amassed more than 100 screen credits over seven decades and preferred stage work while avoiding studio contracts to work with many directors. He is best known internationally for playing Hidetora Ichimonji in Akira Kurosawa's Ran (1985) and for roles in Kagemusha (1980) and High and Low (1963). Nakadai is closely associated with chanbara sword-fighting and samurai-themed films, and his collaborations with Masaki Kobayashi produced Harakiri, Samurai Rebellion, Kwaidan, and The Human Condition trilogy, in which he played a pacifist-socialist.

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