Celebrity Biographies
Ken Takakura
Moviegoers will remember his tough oriental face, associated above all with movies about the yakuza, the Japanese mafia. Ken Takakura, nicknamed “Japanese Clint Eastwood”, died in Tokyo, at the age of 83, on November 10, 2014, as a result of lymphoma. He shared the screen with Michael Douglas and Robert Mitchum.
A native of Fukuoka, in southern Japan, where he came into the world on February 16, 1931, Goichi Oda (real name of Ken Takakura ) suffered the hardships of the postwar period in his youth. After studying at Meiji University, he goes to a casting as an actor for Toei studios, which offered him a fixed contract.
For 10 years he played roles of little relevance, until in 1965 he became a star in his country as the protagonist of Abashiri Bangaichi, a prison drama, where he would play a Japanese mobster. Later he would reappear in numerous sequels to the film, one of the great titles of the Ninkyo Eiga, a type of film that gave a romantic vision of the yakuza, as a defender of the people against the abuses of the authorities and the powerful. With the enormous popular success of this type of film, Toei became one of the most powerful film companies in Japan.
The director Kinji Fukasaku chose him to offer the realistic version of organized crime, as the protagonist of Ôkami to buta to ningen . When Ken Takakura left Toei in 1975, he had made more than 180 films, many of them pertaining to endless sagas, and a great majority of them yakuzas, although he also made some period films, and even occasionally delved into science fiction.
He made his Hollywood debut with a small role as a Japanese officer in Commando in the China Sea , alongside Michael Caine . But international recognition came to him for Yakuza , one of Sydney Pollack ‘s best films , where he had the leading role with Robert Mitchum . He played a traditional Japanese man who, due to a debt of honor, is forced to help an American (Mitchum) rescue a friend’s daughter, kidnapped by gangsters. He had married in 1959 with the popular singer in Japan Chiemi Eri , also an occasional actress, from whom he was divorced.
Takakura was also a part of the other major Hollywood yakuza production, Ridley Scott ‘s Black Rain . He played the Japanese policeman who helped his two American colleagues ( Michael Douglas and Andy Garcia ) as they tried to apprehend an escaped criminal.
But Takakura delivered his most memorable performance late in life, when he became the lead in The Search , Zhang Yimou ‘s return to the drama after a pair of spectacular action films. He embodied a father immersed in a long journey to show his love to his son, sick with cancer.
His last film appearance was in Anata e , directed in 2012 by his compatriot Eiji Shimakura, where Takeshi Kitano seconded him . He played an elderly corrections officer trying to get over the death of his wife.