Kinuyo Tanaka

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Tanaka with Bette Davis on her Diplomatic Mission to Hollywood (1949)
Kinuyo Tanaka was a major star in Japan for five decades, from the mid-1920s to the mid-1970s. She worked with many of the most important directors active during that period, and she appeared in every genre of film: comedy, drama, melodrama, mystery, adventure, historical epic, musical, the socially-conscious "problem film," etc. Not only does Tanaka stand out as a representative of the Japanese film industry, but she also serves as an important cultural icon, the changing face, as it were, of the Showa era (1926-89). In the early 1930s she was the cinema's foremost "modern girl" (moga), representing for her legions female fans a new model of up-to-date femininity. Deftly shifting gears in the late 1930s, Tanaka re-established herself as a wartime heroine, the idealized image of the patriotic wife and mother on the home-front. During the occupation, Tanaka took on yet another role when she was chosen by the Japanese government as the first official public relations delegate dispatched to the United States after the war (an indication not only of Tanaka's stature, but also of film's undeniable status as the dominant cultural medium of the 20th century). In the 1950s, along with stars Toshiro Mifune and Machiko Kyo, Tanaka emerged as a symbol of "new" Japan for worldwide audiences who were being re-introduced to the nation and its culture through the international circulation of Japanese films. And finally, in the last years of her career, Tanaka became an influential spokesperson and active participant in the Japanese counter-culture movement, when she committed herself to a number of fringe film productions

From Ephraim Katz, Film Encyclopedia

Tanaka, Kinuyo. Actress, director. b. November 29, 1909, Shimonoseki, Japan. d. 1977. In Japanese films from the age of 14, after brief experience in light opera, she starred in numerous productions, notably Mizoguchi's Life of Oharu and Ugetsu, Ozu's Equinox Flower, and Kinoshita's Ballad of Narayama. She won the best actress prize at the Berlin Film Festival for Sandakan 8. In 1953 she became the first woman to direct a Japanese film, the lyrical Love Letter. She married director Hiroshi Shimizu in 1929. They later divorced.

From David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film

Garbo and Dietrich were central to the movies for a dozen or so years; Crawford and Davis for perhaps twenty-five; Gish and Pickford for fifteen. Kinuyo Tanaka—their equal or superior as an actress—was a major force in Japanese film for most of her fifty-year career (Katharine Hepburn, I suppose, is her only peer). She appeared in nearly 250 films, many of them very successful, very fine, or both.

She was born poor in a remote part of Japan, joined a music troupe at eleven, and slid quickly into the emerging Japanese film industry. Among her early films were seven silents for Ozu, the most interesting of which is Dragnet Girl (33), in which she is a bad girl who goes good, reforming her boyfriend along the way. Well before that she appeared in The Neighbor's Wife and Mine (31, Heinosuke Gosho), Japan's first talking picture. During the thirties, she acted for Naruse, Gosho, Yasujiro Shimazu, Hiroshi Shimizu (her husband for a while), and Hiromasa Nomura, whose Yearning Laurel (38) was probably her most popular film at a time when she was Japan’s most popular star.

Despite her early success, her greatest period came in the early fifties at the height of her association with Mizoguchi. They had worked together on seven films in the forties, including Utamaro and His Five Women (46) and Women of the Night (48), a blistering attack on prostitution; but The Life of Oharu (52), Ugetsu (53), and Sansho the Bailiff (54) would alone guarantee her screen immortality. Her performance as the potter's wife in Ugetsu, and her reappearance in the last dream, are among the finest things in the world of film.

In 1953 she directed the first of her own six movies, Love Letters, with a script by the director Keisuke Kinoshita, and with herself playing a small role. A further tribute to her came from Ozu, who chose to collaborate on the script of her second film, The Moon Has Risen (55), a very appealing love story, with Tanaka in another supporting role. Her directing career was the first of any significance for a Japanese woman, and it displayed the same intelligence, taste, and intensity of her acting.
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