Kinuyo Tanaka

Kinuyo Tanaka acted in about two hundred and fifty films and then became the second woman in Japan to direct one, which cost her the friendship of the man who had made her famous. She started at fourteen in silent pictures, survived the transition to sound, and worked for almost every major Japanese director across five decades - most importantly for Mizoguchi, in fifteen films including The Life of Oharu and Sansho the Bailiff, where she carries the whole weight of his argument about what was done to women. In 1953 she directed Love Letter. Mizoguchi opposed her publicly, telling the directors' association she lacked the intellect for it, and their working relationship ended; she directed five more films anyway, including one about a woman with breast cancer and one about a prison for women. As an actor she took parts other stars would not, ageing on screen deliberately. Her directing was rediscovered internationally only in the 2020s. Her six films as director are Love Letter, The Moon Has Risen, Forever a Woman, The Wandering Princess, Girls of the Night and Love Under the Crucifix. Forever a Woman is about a poet with breast cancer and shows the mastectomy scar, which no Japanese film had done. Ozu co-wrote The Moon Has Risen for her. She was the first Japanese actor to tour the United States after the war, in 1949, and was criticised at home for returning too Americanised. She acted until the year she died, winning a Berlin prize at sixty-five for Sandakan No. 8.

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