Turns 90 on December 13th!
Born December 13, 1932. Hope he makes it. What a hell of an actor and what a hell of a career!
shareThis guy has been in 3 of my favourite movies of all time. Damn legend.
shareHe one of those actors I always think of as being young for some reason. He was always the "new guy" compared to Mifune, and he always played characters much younger than he was at the time. Now he looks like characters he played 40 years ago. Funny. Now he's almost 90.
shareI much prefer him over Mifune. Mifune always seemed like an overactor to me.
shareMe too. Nakadai is one of the greatest screen actors ever.
shareAs an pure actor Nakadai has it over Mifune by a mile. The 17 (mostly) iconic roles that Mifune played for Kurosawa between 1948 an 1965 are primarily why Mifune is regarded as the greater "movie star". That's nothing to sneeze at. Nakadai didn't really start getting major recognition in the West up until "Kagemusha" and especially "Ran". He never had any big roles in non-Japanese films either. If he had bagged the role of Tiger Tanaka in "You Only Live Twice" or the lead in "Hiroshima, Mon Amour", or something like that, he would have gotten a lot more recognition, although the quality of work might have suffered if he started appear in crappy American World War II films and miniseries. Too bad he wasn't in "Woman in the Dunes", that got a lot of play in art houses in the West. He was superb in Teshigahara's follow-up movie "Face of Another", but unfortunately that was nearly as popular at film festivals as "Dunes". Nakadai's segment of "Kwaidan" was cut from prints of the film outside of Japan for many years. He just wasn't as lucky as Mifune.
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