Isuzu Yamada

Born in Osaka on February 5, 1917, her father, Kusuo Yamada, was an onnagata, a theater actor specializing in female roles, while her mother, Ritsu, was a geisha. As a child she studied traditional dance and music and at 13 she was signed by Nikkatsu studios to appear in various films as a secondary school, almost always in period dramas.

When she was 18 years old, Isuzu Yamada caught the attention of the master Kenji Mizoguchi , who cast her in the leading role of Osen of the Storks , one of the filmmaker’s best silent films, who in the mid-30s was still dispensing with dialogue. The filmmaker also gave her the lead role of her in Maria no Oyuki . In both films she played a girl who, due to circumstances, was forced into prostitution.

Hermanas de Gion , also from Mizoguchi, where she was the youngest of two geisha sisters, had more international repercussions . In the filmmaker’s film Elegía de Naniwa, she played a telephone operator who has no choice but to become the lover of her boss, a married man, in order to pay off family debts.

After World War II, Isuzu Yamada joined a group of actors who carried out a strike against Toho, the studio for which they worked. As a consequence, she was blacklisted, and she had some difficulties for a few years working in film, so she focused on the stage until the mid-50s.

He put himself under the orders of the great master Yasujiro Ozu only once, in Tokyo Twilight . She was a woman who left her husband to go with another man.

In her personal life, after divorcing her husband, Teinosuke Kinugasa, she married her fellow professional Ichiro Tsukida, with whom she had her only daughter, the actress Michiko Saga. Isuzu Yamada was also attached to Kazuo Takita, and actors Yoshi Kato and Tsutomu Shimomoto.

He took great advantage of the actress Akira Kurosawa , who in Throne of Blood , his particular version of William Shakespeare ‘s Macbeth , turned her into Lady Taketoki Washizu, the equivalent of Lady Macbeth, wife of the protagonist, played by Toshiro Mifune . He also accompanied her in two of her other works with Kurosawa, Underworld , where she was the greedy landlady Osugi, and Yojimbo , where she stood out as the ruthless wife of the leader of one of the two warring groups.

Starting in the 1960s, Isuzu Yamada did very little in the cinema, as she decided to focus on her theatrical career. He still appeared sporadically in a tape, although none of them were seen much outside of Japan. In 200 she became the first woman to receive the Imperial Order of Culture, the highest cultural award in her country.