Kōji Yakusho
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Kōji Yakusho ( Japanese 役 所 広 司 }, Yakusho Kōji ; actually 橋本 広 司 , Hashimoto Kōji ; born January 1, 1956 in Isahaya , Nagasaki , Japan ) is a Japanese actor . He works for cinema, theater and television.
biography
Training and entry into the film business
Kōji Yakusho was born as Kōji Hashimoto in Isahaya in 1956, the youngest of five brothers . After graduating from Nagasaki Prefecture High School of Technology in 1974, he started working for the Chiyoda District Township Office in Tokyo ( Chiyoda-ku Yakusho ). He took his stage name from this job.
When he saw a performance of Maxim Gorki's play Die Kleinbürger in 1976 , he decided to become an actor. In the spring of 1978 he auditioned at the Mumeijuku Drama Studio, which the actor Tatsuya Nakadai ran, and was hired. There he met the actress Kawatsu Saeko , whom he married in 1982 and who gave birth to their son in 1985.
Yakusho became known through various roles in television series. In 1983 by NHK produced television drama Tokugawa Ieyasu he played the warlord Oda Nobunaga (1534–1582), the samurai Miyamoto Musashi (1584–1645) he played from 1984 to 1985 in a television series of the same name.
First successes and breakthrough
In the comedy Tampopo (1985), the actual plot of which is the introduction of a noodle soup restaurant, he played the role of the white-clad yakuza . He had his second major feature film role in the Soviet-Japanese coproduction The White Wolf from 1990, for which he was first nominated for the Japanese Academy Award . In doing so, however, he had to admit defeat to Ittoku Kishibe , who was awarded the Cannes Grand Jury Prize for the film Sting of Death .
His final breakthrough in Japan came from 1996 to 1997. In Masayuki Suo's dance film Shall we dance? (1996) played Shohei Sugiyama . The film was very successful in Japan, both at film awards and at the box office, and sparked a dance boom. Later came about in the USA under the title May I ask? a remake of the film in which Richard Gere played his original role. For his role in Shall We Dance? Kōji Yakusho won the Japanese Academy Award, the Blue Ribbon Award , the Kinema Junpo Award and the Hochi Film Award, among others . In addition to leading roles in Tatsuoki Hosonos Shabu gokudo (1996) and Yoshimitsu Moritas Shitsuraken (1997), he was the leading actor in Shōhei Imamura's melodrama The Eel , which won the Palme d'Or at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival . The actor won his second Japanese Academy Award for Shitsuraken and Der Eel , for which he was nominated six times between 1999 and 2005.
He had another success with the thriller Cure , for which he was awarded Best Actor at the 1997 Tokyo International Film Festival . With the director of Kyua , Kiyoshi Kurosawa , he worked several times in the following years - including on Kōrei (2000) and Doppelganger (2003) - together ( “The people in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's films never look as if they were getting enough sleep . " - The New York Times ). The second collaboration with director Shōhei Imamura took place in 2001 with the film water games , where he portrays an unemployed Sarariman who meets a strange woman in search of treasure.
Projects abroad
In 2005, Kōji Yakusho had a supporting role in the American love drama The Geisha , where Zhang Ziyi and Ken Watanabe took over the leading roles. Based on Arthur Golden 's novel of the same name , the film won three Academy Awards and grossed over US $ 157 million worldwide. His second American film was Alejandro González Iñárritus Film Babel , which premiered in May 2006 at the Cannes Film Festival. In Babel he played alongside Brad Pitt , Cate Blanchett and Gael García Bernal, among others . In the film he embodies Yasujiro , the father of the deaf youth Chieko (played by Rinko Kikuchi ), who gave up his job as a big game hunter and gave his rifle to his former Moroccan hunting guide.
Filmography
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Web links
- Kōji Yakusho in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Official Homepage (Japanese)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Terrence Rafferty: This Time, the Horror's in the Normality. In: The New York Times . March 6, 2009, accessed on March 8, 2009 (English): "The people in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's movies never look as though they're getting enough sleep"
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Yakusho, Kōji |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | 役 所 広 司 (Japanese, pseudonym); 橋本 広 司 (Japanese, real name); Hashimoto Kōji (real name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Japanese actor |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 1, 1956 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Isahaya , Nagasaki, Japan |