The Face of an Actor - The Life and Films of Tatsuya Nakadai

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Paperback

English

354 pages with pictures

After a bad experience making his film debut in Seven Samurai in 1954, Tatsuya Nakadai was a jobbing actor until cast as the hero of Masaki Kobayashi’s World War II trilogy, The Human Condition (1959-61). Elevated to star status as a result, he went on to co-star with Toshiro Mifune in Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, Sanjuro and High and Low, later playing the leads in the director’s late masterpieces, Kagemusha and Ran. Although it is the Kurosawa films for which Nakadai remains best-known abroad, he appeared in multiple films for many of Japan’s top directors, including Masaki Kobayashi’s Harakiri and Kwaidan, Kihachi Okamoto’s Sword of Doom, Mikio Naruse’s When a Woman Ascends the Stairs and Hiroshi Teshigahara’s The Face of Another.

The first English-language biography of this major Japanese star reveals how he overcame a traumatic childhood to find salvation in acting, examines the factors which enabled him to sustain such an exceptionally long and successful career, and explains why, despite appearing in over 160 feature films, he always considered himself first and foremost a theatre actor. The Face of an Actor is full of behind-the-scenes stories which shine a light on Nakadai’s sometimes rocky relationships with his directors and co-stars. Based largely on Japanese-language sources, it also covers his impressive stage career and contains detailed descriptions of many Nakadai films which have seldom been seen in the West.

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