Though he had the well-appointed bone structure of the 1950s matinee idol, it was Tatsuya Nakadai’s eyes that seized film audiences. Using these huge brown saucers to telegraph naivety or eerie self-possession, the Japanese actor, who has died aged 92, seemed at times to be able to make them protrude from his skull.
In the centrepiece scene of Akira Kurosawa’s 1985 King Lear adaptation Ran, when Nakadai’s warlord is ejected from his burning castle, his glare of incipient madness is unbearable.
And it was his piercing gaze that had earned him his first leading role, when the director Masaki Kobayashi cast him as the pacifist antihero of the nine-hour, three-part war epic The Human Condition (1959-61), who freezes to death in the Manchurian wastes. “He later told me that as he was imagining that final scene, and the look in [the protagonist’s] eyes when he has partly lost his mind, ‘The eyes I saw in my mind were yours, Nakadai,’” the actor recalled.
This indelible gaze helped make Nakadai a mainstay of golden-age Japanese cinema and beyond, working 11 times with Kobayashi and six times with Kurosawa, in addition to other significant long-running collaborations with Mikio Naruse, Kon Ichikawa and others.
Theatrically trained, Nakadai’s range across more than 150 film credits was impressive, spanning virile duelling in Kurosawa’s early 60s chanbara (swordplay) classics; the high-minded realism of The Human Condition; domestic melodrama such as Naruse’s When a Women Ascends the Stairs (1960); and hipster-inflected psychodrama such as The Face of Another (1966).
The more restrained Nakadai was often paired effectively with the great screen animal Toshiro Mifune, whom he regarded as his senpai (elder), especially in terms of martial prowess. Searching for an equal adversary to Mifune in Yojimbo (1961), Kurosawa asked Nakadai to play his prowling killer – who brandishes a pistol like a toy gun – as a “snake” versus the star’s “stray dog”.
Facing off again in Sanjuro (1962), Mifune dispatches Nakadai’s henchman at close quarters in a geyser of blood that was shockingly graphic for the era. “Teaming Mifune and Nakadai is, to a samurai film, the equivalent of having John Wayne and Lee Marvin in the same cast,” Variety wrote in 1967, after the release of The Sword of Doom, another team-up.
They also collaborated outside the genre, such as in Kurosawa’s 1963 crime film High and Low or the 1965 war film Fort Graveyard – though Nakadai, less flashy, never attained Mifune’s degree of global renown.
Nakadai was consistently drawn to playing nonconformists and outsiders at odds with establishment values, such as the disabled seducer in Kon Ichikawa’s 1958 temple drama Conflagration, or the disfigured industrial worker swathed in bandages in The Face of Another. His handsomeness had a waxy, uncanny set that enhanced such subversive activities.
Kaji, his emblematic dissident in The Human Condition, was modelled directly on its director, Kobayashi, who refused any promotions as a second world war conscript in Manchuria. And it was for Kobayashi that Nakadai performed what he later considered his most memorable role: the devastated ronin (masterless samurai) who exposes the hollowness and underlying cruelty of the samurai bushido code in Harakiri (1962).
Nakadai acquired this sceptic’s remit as part of the generation born into imperial Japan, but too young to fight in the second world war, who then came of age in the postwar wreckage. Born under the name Tomohisa Nakadai in south-west Tokyo, he grew up between the capital and Chiba. After his bus driver father, Tadao, died when he was a young boy, his mother, Aiko, worked as an assistant dressmaker in order to support him, his elder half-sister and young brother and sister.
Still struggling for money after the war, he enrolled at Haiyuza acting school; a friend suggested his looks might serve him well. Haiyuza followed the shingeki ethos of realism that was moving Japanese acting on from the stylisation of kabuki and noh theatre. A voracious addict of western films, Nakadai was fully on board – admiring the loose-limbed Marlon Brando in 1954’s On the Waterfront.
After making his debut in the meta-cinematic Hi no Tori, Nakadai cameoed for Kobayashi – who spotted the actor working in a shop – in the war film The Thick-Walled Room (both 1956). He also appeared for three seconds as a strolling warrior in The Seven Samurai a year later: after Kurosawa derided his technique during the multiple takes required, he initially refused to work with him again on Yojimbo. He also showed this proud streak in refusing to tie himself to a contract with the producers of Hi no Tori, Nikkatsu, and later any other film studio. Remaining a “freelance nandemoya” (Jack-of-all-trades) allowed him to moonlight for other studios and carry on appearing in theatre.
He remained committed to the stage – performing in productions of Shakespeare, Sophocles and Gorky, among others – and the craft throughout his career. In 1975 he founded the Mumeijuku acting school with his wife, the actor and director Yasuko Miyazaki, whom he had married in 1957; it moved into the same tenement building where he grew up in poverty. After meeting the American Method guru Lee Strasberg, he took his advice to be deliberately choosy about who to take on: among the school’s graduates was Koji Yakusho, the recent star of Wim Wenders’ toilet-cleaning meditation Perfect Days (2024).
Nakadai continued to work steadily after the decline of the Japanese studio system in the 70s. In 1980 he reunited with Kurosawa for Kagemusha, replacing Shintaro Katsu in the role of a thief called to impersonate a warlord, after Katsu fell out with the director.
Their last collaboration was Ran. Only 51 when he made the film, Nakadai was nonetheless becoming an elder statesmen of Japanese culture; he was awarded the country’s Medal with Purple Ribbon for artistic achievements in 1996, and the superlative Order of Culture in 2015.
He returned to the desolate heath one more time in one of his final film roles, Lear on the Shore (2017), about an ageing actor who escapes his retirement home.
By this point, his own longevity was well assured, telling Tokyo Journal in 2019: “I hesitated before I began, thinking acting seemed difficult. But once I began, I never looked back.”
Yasuko died in 1996. He is survived by his daughter, Nao.
• Tatsuya Nakadai, actor, born 13 December 1932; died 8 November 2025
