Tatsuya Nakadai, a prolific actor whose work with many of the most accomplished directors in Japan made him one of the country’s biggest movie stars and gave him international reach in films like Akira Kurosawa’s “Ran,” died on Saturday in Tokyo. He was 92.
He died of pneumonia in a hospital, said Naoko Ema, an actress at Mumeijuku, the theater company and acting school that Mr. Nakadai founded in Tokyo in 1975.
With his intensely expressive eyes often widened for effect, Mr. Nakadai appeared in more than 100 films over a seven-decade career. He moved easily between the blunt physicality and theatrics of Samurai sword fight movies, known as chanbara, and the more nuanced performances of domestic dramas.
He was perhaps best known outside of Japan as the star of “Ran,” Mr. Kurosawa’s 1985 retelling of Shakespeare’s “King Lear.” Heavily made up to play the 80-year-old king (Mr. Nakadai was in his early 50s at the time), the performance’s emotional intensity, highly stylized movements and stiff theatricality evoked traditional Japanese Kabuki theater.
Mr. Nakadai also worked with other seminal postwar Japanese directors, including Mikio Naruse, Masaki Kobayashi, Kihachi Okamoto and Kon Ichikawa. He also appeared on television, in roles large and small, and in several plays.
Early in his career, Mr. Nakadai often worked opposite Toshiro Mifune, one of Japan’s best-known acting exports. They could not have been less alike: Mr. Mifune, untrained as an actor but with wild energy, often presented a gruff, overtly physical persona, while Mr. Nakadai took on vastly different characters and delivered subtly intricate performances.
They usually played adversaries. In “Yojimbo” (1961) and “Sanjuro” (1962), both directed by Mr. Kurosawa, and “Samurai Rebellion” (1967), directed by Mr. Kobayashi, the two meet in climatic duels, with Mr. Mifune’s character winning each time with a horizontal slash to the midsection. In “Sanjuro,” the fatal cut released a towering fountain of blood.
Years later, Mr. Nakadai had the lead roles in both “Ran” and “Kagemusha” (1980), another Kurosawa film, that might have gone to Mr. Mifune had it not been for friction between him and the director.
