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Tatsuya Nakadai, a prolific actor whose work with many of the most accomplished directors in Japan made him one of the country’s biggest movie stars, died on Saturday in Tokyo. He was 92.
He died of pneumonia in a hospital, said Naoko Ema, an actress at Mumeijuku, the theater company and acting school that Mr. Nakadai founded in Tokyo in 1975.
With his intensely expressive eyes often widened for effect, Mr. Nakadai appeared in more than 100 films over a seven-decade career. He moved easily between the blunt physicality and theatrics of Samurai sword fight movies — known as chanbara — and the more nuanced performances of domestic dramas.
He was perhaps best known outside of Japan as the star of “Ran,” Akira Kurosawa’s 1985 retelling of Shakespeare’s “King Lear.” Heavily made up to play the 80-year-old king (Mr. Nakadai was in his early 50s at the time), the performance’s emotional intensity, highly stylized movements and stiff theatricality evoked traditional Japanese Kabuki theater.
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Mr. Nakadai also worked with other seminal postwar Japanese directors, including Mikio Naruse, Masaki Kobayashi, Kihachi Okamoto and Kon Ichikawa. He also appeared on television, in roles large and small, and in several plays.
Early in his career, Mr. Nakadai often worked opposite Toshiro Mifune, one of Japan’s best-known acting exports. They could not have been less alike: Mr. Mifune, untrained as an actor but with wild energy, often presented a gruff, overtly physical persona, while Mr. Nakadai took on vastly different characters and delivered subtly intricate performances.
They usually played adversaries. In “Yojimbo” (1961) and “Sanjuro” (1962), both directed by Mr. Kurosawa, and “Samurai Rebellion” (1967), directed by Mr. Kobayashi, the two meet in climatic duels, with Mr. Mifune’s character winning each time with a horizontal slash to the midsection. In “Sanjuro,” the fatal cut released a towering fountain of blood.
Years later, Mr. Nakadai had the lead roles in both “Ran” and “Kagemusha” (1980), another Kurosawa film, that might have gone to Mr. Mifune had it not been for friction between him and the director.
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Tatsuya Nakadai was born as Motohisa Nakadai in Tokyo on Dec. 13, 1932. He trained as a stage actor after World War II in what was called the “Shingeki” movement, based on acting style that favored realism over the traditional formalities of Kabuki and Noh theater.
In the 1950s, Mr. Nakadai made his screen debut in “The Thick Walled Room,” a drama about Japanese soldiers jailed for crimes against humanity.
For his second part, Mr. Nakadai appeared in Mr. Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai” (1954), arguably the best-known Japanese movie of all time. But even alert watchers can easily miss him: He appears for just three seconds, portraying an unnamed wandering Samurai striding down a village street. Mr. Nakadai would later say how Mr. Kurosawa patiently had him try the walking scene over and over.
Mr. Nakadai said in an interview that his long career might never have happened if he hadn’t received all that attention from one of cinema’s greatest directors.
The lanky young actor soon vaulted into a busy career. Although he appeared in three other Kurosawa films, he was best known for his work with Mr. Kobayashi, starring in “The Human Condition” trilogy (1959 to 1961) and other Kobayashi films. In the trilogy, Mr. Nakadai played an idealistic labor camp supervisor-turned-soldier-turned-prisoner-of-war who undergoes seemingly endless ordeals and deprivations.
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Information on Mr. Nakadai’s survivors was not immediately available. He was married for 40 years to Tomoe Ryu, who went by Yasuko Miyazaki as an actress and Ryu as a writer. She died in 1996.
Mr. Nakadai worked less as he grew older, appearing in television shows and in films that were not exported from Japan. He spent much of his time at Mumeijuku, his theater company and acting school.
While Mr. Nakadai never gained the wide recognition in the West that Mr. Mifune did, his work did receive several retrospectives in New York City, including in 1975 at Japan House and in 2008 at Film Forum.
The film writer Chuck Stephens, in a 2009 essay for the Criterion Collection, which issued many of Mr. Nakadai’s films on DVD and Blu-ray, said Mr. Nakadai was so prominent in Japanese films of the 20th century that he deserved the title “The Eighth Samurai.”
John Yoon and Hisako Ueno contributed reporting.
