Tatsuya Nakadai

His beard caught fire during the apocalyptic castle-burning scene in Ran (1985).

He played characters of a very different age from his own through his career. In Hara-Kiri (1962), he played a samurai in his 50s while he was 33. In Kwaidan (1964), he played a 18-year-old woodcutter when he himself was 36. In Ran (1985) he played a nearly 80-year-old war lord when he was 56.

Speaks some lines in Mandarin in The Human Condition I: No Greater Love (1959) and some in English in Today We Kill, Tomorrow We Die! (1968) but learned these phonetically and is self-described as "terrible" at learning additional languages.

Although perhaps most regularly associated with his works with Masaki Kobayashi, Koyabashi was only his second most prolific collaborator among film directors. His most frequent director collaborators were: Kihachi Okamoto with whom he did 12 films, Koyabashi with whom he did 11 films, Hideo Gosha with whom he did 10 films, 6 films each with Akira Kurosawa and Kon Ichikawa, and Mikio Naruse with whom he did 5 films. The longest collaboration would be with Ichiwawa, with whom he did his first film in 1958, his last with in 2006, 48 years later.

Japanese leading man, an important star and one of the handful of Japanese actors well known outside Japan. Nakadai was a tall handsome clerk in a Tokyo shop when director Masaki Kobayashi encountered him and cast him in The Thick-Walled Room (1956). Nakadai was subsequently cast in the lead role in Kobayashi's monumental trilogy 'Ningen no joken' and became a star whose international acclaim rivaled that of countryman Toshirô Mifune. Like Mifune, Nakadai worked frequently with director Akira Kurosawa and indeed more or less replaced Mifune as Kurosawa's principal leading man after the well-known falling out between Mifune and Kurosawa.

While filming his first appearance on film as an extra on Seven Samurai (1954), Akira Kurosawa spent more than 5 minutes lecturing on how to walk correctly as a wandering samurai for an appearance that totals about 4 seconds in duration.

Although it was commonplace for actors, evening leading men, in Japan to do their own stunt work in the 1950s through at least the 1970s (when actor's union laws enforced safer conditions on sets), the film sets of Masaki Kobayashi were particularly dangerous for Nakadai. During the filming of "The Human Condition", Nakadai was actually beaten by other actors in a boot-camp scene where his character Kaji is brutalized for rebelling against more experienced soldiers. According to Nakadai, the swelling of his face and some of the blood is real on this scene. Later in The Human Condition, his character collapses in a frozen field and is covered by snow, this was real snow and done by Nakadai himself, who came very near to hypothermia. During the filming of Hara-Kiri (1962) real, sharp samurai swords were used in the battle scenes (according to Nakadai, this is not his only samurai film where real swords were used but is the only one where absolutely no dull, stage swords were utilized), much to Nakadai's very reasonable concern, since a mistimed slash could have been fatal for him or the other actors. Amazingly, no one was seriously injured during filming.