Ken watanabe

Born on October 21, 1959, in Koide (Nigata), a town on the island of Honshu, Kensaku Watanabe –his full name– had a couple of teachers as parents, who had to move several times from town due to vicissitudes of their profession. . From his childhood, he learned to play the trumpet, and although upon graduating from high school in 1978 he wanted to study at a Tokyo conservatory, his parents had no money to pay for his tuition, due to his father suffering from an illness that prevented him from working. .

He ended up moving anyway to the Japanese capital, where he took his first steps in the theater, until he was chosen as the lead in the play “Shimodani Mannecho Monogatari”, with which he received rave reviews. They soon recruited him to debut on television, as a samurai, in Mibu no koiuta , from 1983. Two years later he was shooting his first feature film, Setouchi shonen yakyu dan , a drama set during World War II.

For two decades he worked exclusively in his country, in productions with hardly any international impact. Titles like Tampopo (1985) by Juzo Itami , Welcome Back, Mr. McDonald (1997) by Koki Mitani, or Bonds (1998) by Kichitaro Negishi, will say little to the Western viewer, despite the fact that they were a hit in Japan. In 1989, while filming Haruki Kadokawa ‘s Heaven and Earth , Watanabe was diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia. After undergoing chemotherapy, he returned to acting, and although in 1991 he suffered a relapse, he managed to recover.

Thus, Edward Zwick was completely unknown to him when he appeared at his casting, to star in The Last Samurai , with Tom Cruise . The director did not hesitate to choose him to give life to the samurai Katsumoto Moritsugu, the emperor’s former teacher and adviser, with whom the American captain Nathan Algren (Cruise) will live in 19th century Japan. He left such a good taste in the mouth of the work of Ken Watanabe that he was nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe for best secondary.

From that moment on, they have been raffled off in the United States. Christopher Nolan makes him the leader of a sinister cult, Ra’s Al Ghul, in Batman Begins , while Rob Marshall recruits him as the president of Japan, which changes the miserable life of Shiyo ( Zhang Ziyi , curiously a Chinese national, although she played a Japanese), in Memoirs of a Geisha , adaptation of the famous novel by Arthur Golden. Perhaps his best role is General Kuribayashi, sent to prepare the defense of the Pacific island mentioned in the title of Letters from Iwo Jima , with which Clint Eastwood closed a diptych after Flags of our Fathers ,offering the other side of the war, from the point of view of the Japanese enemy, governed by an ancient sense of honor.

Divorced from Yumiko Watanabe, with whom he had two children, he joined fellow actress Kaho Minami in 2005. He adopted her son from a previous marriage, and they both had another offspring, but they also eventually separated. Her daughter Anne Watanabe, who she had with Yumiko, follows in her footsteps in acting, succeeding especially on Japanese television.

Ken Watanabe could have stayed in Hollywood, but he refuses to forget his beginnings, because since he succeeded abroad, he has combined blockbusters with small titles in his country. The seconds hardly make a sound, although it is worth noting the choral Cólera (Ikari), where he embroiders a port worker, who has managed to get his daughter out of prostitution, but lives in fear of losing her again. “I enjoy both sides. Right now I live the privilege of doing only what interests me in both countries, and of enjoying a balance between both parties”, he explained.

In the United States it is still highly valued. For example, Christopher Nolan turned to him again, to give life to a tycoon, known as The Tourist, in Origin , while Gus Van Sant gave him the role of suicide, in The Forest of Dreams . Other times, he resorts to purely food jobs, such as in Godzilla , where he plays a Japanese man who tries to solve the threat of the radioactive monster, a role he has repeated in the even more boring (if possible) sequel, Godzilla, King of the Monsters.. Despite the abundance of titles in which he has intervened, he claims that he is not entirely comfortable in the United States. “I’m embarrassed to perform in English,” he says. “Today I still do it with insecurity; I don’t know to what extent I am able to handle it as a language. I feel ashamed on many occasions, but it is something that you have to face with the feeling that it is a challenge.

The Japanese star has also triumphed singing on the Broadway stage. She starred in “The King and I”, a musical by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II , where she plays the King of Siam, who on screen was Yul Brynner . Despite being nominated for a Tony, he had to leave because cancer returned to do its thing, this time they had to operate on a tumor in his stomach from which he happily recovered.