RIP Tatsuya Nakadai

 

Tatsuya Nakadai, Japanese Film Legend That Starred in ‘Ran,’ ‘Harakiri’ and ‘The Human Condition’ Trilogy, Dies at 92

Variety

By J. Kim Murphy

November 10, 2025

 

Tatsuya Nakadai, one of Japan’s most celebrated stage and screen actors who was a frequent collaborator of director Masaki Kobayashi and led Akira Kurosawa titles such as “Ran,” “Kagemusha” and “High and Low,” has died. He was 92.

Nakadai’s death was reported Tuesday in Japan by The Japan News.

With more than 100 screen credits through his seven-decade-spanning career, Nakadai’s body of work spanned a veritable who’s-who of Japanese cinema for the second half of the twentieth century, working with filmmakers like Hiroshi Teshigahara, Mikio Naruse and Kon Ichikawa. He considered himself primarily a theater actor, and he did not sign an overall contract with any Japanese studio, leaving him free to work with many different directors.

His on-screen debut was an uncredited role playing a prisoner in Kobayashi’s 1953 drama “The Thick-Walled Room,” beginning a partnership that would continue through the next three decades and include titles like “Samurai Rebellion” and “Kwaidan.”

To Western audiences, Nakadai is perhaps best known for his leading turn in Kurosawa’s 1985 drama “Ran,” a Sengoku-period-set war epic inspired by Shakespeare’s “King Lear” that earned Kurosawa his only Oscar nomination. Then just in his early 50s, Nakadai played much older leading the film as Ichimonji Hidetora, wearing intense, ghost-like makeup to portray a desolate, world-weary warlord.

Nakadai was a fixture of the chanbara genre, leading some of the most enduring samurai films, including Kobayashi’s sublimely existential “Harakiri” and Kihachi Okamoto’s more comedic “Kill!” He played the grinning villain to Toshiro Mifune’s scowling hero twice — as a grinning, gun-toting gangster in 1961’s “Yojimbo” and a balder and more prideful samurai foil in 1962’s “Sanjuro,” the latter of which ended with one of the era’s most memorably bloody death scenes. Nakadai had been coming off of a breakout lead turn in Kobayashi’s “The Human Condition” trilogy, in which the actor played a pacifist enduring Japan’s turn to totalitarian rule amid World War II.

Mifune and Kurosawa would collaborate again on the sprawling 1963 kidnap thriller “High and Low,” in which Nakadai played the chief detective that sets up base camp in the luxurious apartment of Mifune’s callous lead. In the late ’70s, Kurosawa tapped Nakadai again, this time to lead the epic jidaigeki “Kagemusha.”

NAKADAI, Tatsuysa (Motohisa Nakadai)

Born: 12/13/1932, Tokyo, Japan

Died: 11/8/2025, Tokyo, Japan

Tatsuya Nakadai’s western – actor:

Today We Kill… Tomorrow We Die! – 1967 (James Elfego)

East Meets West 1995 (Rentaro Katsu)