Setsuko Hara, the Japanese actor renowned for her on-screen collaborations with the celebrated golden-age director Yasujiro Ozu, has died. According to Japanese news media, Hara died on 5 September aged 95 after being hospitalised with pneumonia.
Hara made six films for Ozu, including the widely acknowledged masterwork Tokyo Story in 1953, in which she played a grieving widow who befriends the parents of her dead husband, after they are ignored by their surviving children. In a blog posted to mark her 90th birthday, Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw described her performance in Tokyo Story as “absolutely captivating … I defy anyone to watch this film and not feel simply overwhelmed with a kind of love for Hara”.
Hara’s first film with Ozu was Late Spring, in 1949, in which she played an unmarried daughter whose father plays a trick on her to ensure she gets married, but she had been working as an actor since 1935, when she made her debut at 15 in a studio film for Nikkatsu Corporation.
Hara was born Masae Aida in Yokohama in 1920. A family connection through her brother-in-law, the film director Hisatora Kumagai, led to a contract with Nikkatsu. She made numerous films in the prewar and wartime Japanese film industry, including the German-Japanese co-production Daughter of the Samurai, shot in 1936 with Nazi propagandist Arnold Fanck as co-director and intended to boost relations between the two countries.
After the war, Hara became a key face in Japan’s cinematic revival, and was cast in a lead role in Akira Kurosawa’s No Regrets for Our Youth (1946) and Kōzaburō Yoshimura’s A Ball at the Anjo House (1947), both of which lamented the price Japan paid for its prewar militarism. In addition to the series of finely observed dramas she made with Ozu in the 50s, she played the female lead in Kurosawa’s adaptation of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot in 1951, and her final role, in the samurai epic Chūshingura, directed by Hiroshi Inagaki, in 1962.
Hara then retired from acting at 42, and had little contact with the media thereafter.
