Nakadai was working as a clerk when Kobayashi cast him as one of the Japanese soldiers imprisoned for crimes against humanity in The Thick-Walled Room (1956). The film would have been his debut – it was shot in 1953 – but studio Shochiku, facing government pressure, raised concerns over the still-raw subject matter and insisted Kobayashi made cuts; when the director refused, the film was shelved.
For the realist Kobayashi, Nakadai was a sympathetic, pliable presence. In the director’s acclaimed trilogy of WW2 films known collectively as The Human Condition (1959-61), Nakadai – cast as the pacifist Kaji, ever more isolated as his country gears up for war – found himself pummelled by his co-stars during one gruelling bootcamp sequence; he nearly succumbed to hypothermia after a scene that required him to collapse in a snowy field.
Further tests awaited him. In Kobayashi’s Harakiri (1962) – an unusually patient and textured bushido opus – Nakadai had to dodge actual samurai swords; he escaped relatively lightly as the woodcutter stalked by a spectre in Kobayashi’s folk-horror portmanteau Kwaidan (1964).
His best-known films, however, were those he made around the same time with “the Emperor” Kurosawa. The filmmaker initially regarded Nakadai with scepticism, giving him five minutes of direction for what proved a four-second background appearance in The Seven Samurai. After seeing the actor’s layered work for Kobayashi, however, Kurosawa afforded Nakadai another chance.
For Yojimbo (1961), Kurosawa’s direction was even more idiosyncratic, telling Toshiro Mifune to play the hero as a wolf and Nakadai, as the smirking, villainous Unosuke, to imagine himself a snake. After the film’s success, the three reteamed, with Nakadai playing a new character in the sequel Sanjuro (1962) and then excelling as the detective quizzing Mifune’s businessman in the crime thriller High and Low (1963).
Approaching middle age, Nakadai was returned to Kurosawa’s orbit by happenstance. During pre-production on Kagemusha (1980), Kurosawa fired star Shintaro Katsu for bringing a video camera into rehearsals; Nakadai replaced Katsu in the dual lead role of a feudal lord and his thief lookalike. The actors, who had been friends, didn’t speak for several years.
Kagemusha won the Palme d’Or, though Kurosawa insisted it was merely a dress rehearsal for his dream project: Ran, his feudal reworking of King Lear, with Nakadai as octogenarian Lord Hidetora Ichimonji. While a grand success, the shoot recalled Nakadai’s demanding earlier work with Kobayashi: he spent four hours a day in make-up, while his beard caught fire amid the climactic castle-burning.
He was born Motohisa Nakadai in Tokyo on December 13, 1932, the second of four children to working-class parents. His father Tadao, a bus driver, died before his ninth birthday; his mother Aiko worked as a dressmaker’s assistant. Evacuated to Senkawa during the Pacific War, he eventually returned to Tokyo, where he completed his education, took menial jobs and found solace in the cinema. (He cited John Wayne, Gary Cooper and Marlon Brando among his acting heroes.)
Unable to afford university, Nakadai instead took acting classes at the Haiyuza Training school, eventually falling in with the avant-garde playwright Kōbō Abe, who’d written The Thick-Walled Room. He played the bar manager in Naruse’s When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960) and Hamlet on stage in 1964; he cut loose as a sociopathic samurai in The Sword of Doom (1966) and voiced the Devil in the cult animation Belladonna of Sadness (1973).
In 1975, he formed the Mumeijuku acting school, whose pupils included Kōji Yakusho, the star of Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days (2023). He starred in Hachi-ko (1987), the canine-centred tearjerker later remade with Richard Gere as Hachi: A Dog’s Tale (2009), before a rare venture into English-language cinema with the deeply unofficial sequel Return from the River Kwai (1989).
In the new century, he made a voice cameo in Ghibli’s animated The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013); he received the Japanese Order of Culture in 2015, and the Japanese Academy’s Award of Honour in 2016. His final screen appearance came in The Pass: Last Days of the Samurai (2020), although he gave his final performance on stage this May.
Asked why he’d played so many warriors, Nakadai said: “I’m quieter than average, and a bit solitary. I think maybe those characteristics have something in common with the positive elements of a samurai. I’m a loner.”
His 1957 marriage to the actress and screenwriter Yasuko Miyazaki endured until her death in 1996.
Tatsuya Nakadai, born December 13, 1932, died November 8, 2025.
