Setsuko Hara

Setsuko Hara played the daughter who will not marry in six films for Ozu, retired at forty-two the year he died, and lived another fifty-two years without ever explaining why or appearing in public again. She was put into films at fifteen because the family needed money, and was sent to Germany in 1937 for a Japanese-German co-production made as propaganda, which made her famous at home. She worked through the war in films the occupation later disliked and then through the occupation in films about democracy. With Ozu from 1949 she became the figure his cinema is built around: the smiling daughter whose cheerfulness is a duty, most exactly in Late Spring and Tokyo Story. She was called the Eternal Virgin by the press, never married, and refused nearly all interviews. After Ozu's funeral in 1963 she stopped, moved to Kamakura, and declined every request for the rest of her life. She died at ninety-five and the news was released two months later. She appeared in six Ozu films - Late Spring, Early Summer, Tokyo Story, Tokyo Twilight, Late Autumn and The End of Summer - and in Kurosawa s The Idiot and No Regrets for Our Youth. The German film of 1937, The New Earth, was directed by Arnold Fanck as a propaganda co-production and she toured Germany for it at seventeen. Her real name was Masae Aida. She gave one short interview in 1992 and refused all others. Journalists who found her house in Kamakura were asked politely to leave, for fifty years.

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