Kinuyo Tanaka


Kinuyo Tanaka was a Japanese actress and film director. She had a career lasting over 50 years with more than 250 acting credits, but was best known for her 15 films with director Kenji Mizoguchi, such as The Life of Oharu and Ugetsu. With her 1953 directorial debut, Love Letter, Tanaka became the second Japanese woman to direct a film, after Tazuko Sakane. Tanaka won the Silver Bear for Best Actress for her performance in the film Sandakan No. 8.

Biography

Early life and career

Tanaka was born in Shimonoseki, Yamaguchi Prefecture, the youngest of nine children of Kumekichi and Yasu Tanaka. Her family were kimono merchants. Although her family was originally wealthy, after her father Kumekichi died in 1912, the family began having financial troubles. She learned playing the biwa at an early age and moved to Osaka in 1920, where she joined the Biwa Girls' Operetta Troupe. Tanaka's first credited film appearance was in Genroku Onna in 1924, which also marked the start of her affiliation with the Shochiku Studios. She lived with director Hiroshi Shimizu from 1927 to 1929 after appearing in a number of his films; although they separated in 1929, she starred in some of his later films. Tanaka remained unmarried for her entire life and had no children.
She became a leading actress at an early age, appearing in Yasujirō Ozu's I Graduated, But... in 1929. The following year she played the lead in Aiyoku no ki, and in 1931 she appeared in Japan's first sound film, The Neighbor's Wife and Mine, directed by Heinosuke Gosho. Gosho also directed her in his adaptation of the famous Yasunari Kawabata story, The Dancing Girl of Izu. In the 1930s, Tanaka became so popular that the titles of many feature films used her name, as in Kinuyo Monogatari, Joi Kinuyo Sensei and Kinuyo no Hatsukoi. In 1938, she starred in Hiromasa Nomura's Aizen katsura with Ken Uehara, who was the highest-grossing movie of the prewar period. In 1940, she worked with Kenji Mizoguchi for the first time, starring in Naniwa Onna, which is regarded as a lost film. The following year, she appeared in Ornamental Hairpin, directed by Shimizu, which nowadays ranks, also thanks to Tanaka's performance, as one of the director's most mature achievements. 1944 saw her first collaboration with director Keisuke Kinoshita in the patriotic piece Army. The film became famous for its finale which, a subversion of its militarist message, showed a mother desperately trying to catch a last glimpse of her son who is marching off to war.

Post-war career

Starting in October 1949, Tanaka made a three-month trip to the United States as one of Japan's first post-war cultural envoys. On her return, Tanaka displayed an inheritance of cultural mannerisms from America which many of her fans found distasteful. She resigned from Shochiku and announced her intention of going freelance, which would give her more scope to choose which directors she wished to work with. She subsequently worked on films with Mikio Naruse, Ozu, Kinoshita, Gosho and others. She had a close working relationship with director Kenji Mizoguchi, having parts in 15 of his films, including leading roles in The Life of Oharu, Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff. A recurrent topic of these films, both contemporary and historic dramas, was the fate of women mistreated by family, lovers and society. Tanaka's and Mizoguchi's involvement was the subject of much speculation, on which the actress commented in the 1975 documentary Kenji Mizoguchi: The Life of a Film Director that she and Mizoguchi were "married in front of the camera, but not behind it". Their working relationship ended when Mizoguchi countered a recommendation from the Directors Guild of Japan for the Nikkatsu studio to hire her as a director.

Director and actress

Tanaka was the second Japanese woman who worked as a film director, after Tazuko Sakane. Despite Mizoguchi's objection against her application, Tanaka was able to give her directing debut with Love Letter in 1953. Scripted by Kinoshita, it was entered as a contestant in the Cannes Film Festival in 1954. She directed five more films between 1953 and 1962, focusing on the subject of femininity; while her films received less attention from contemporary commentators and Tanaka herself downplayed them, interest in them has been revived in recent years for their unique and pioneering portrayals of Japanese women. The Moon Has Risen in 1955 was scripted by Yasujirō Ozu, and The Wandering Princess was scripted by Natto Wada and starred Machiko Kyō. One of Tanaka's most acknowledged films, The Eternal Breasts, follows the biography of the late tanka poet Fumiko Nakajo. In addition to her directing jobs, Tanaka continued with her acting career, appearing in Kinoshita's The [Ballad of Narayama (1958 film)|The Ballad Of Narayama], for which she received the Kinema Junpo Award for Best Actress, and in Akira Kurosawa's Red Beard. During the 1960s, she moved increasingly towards television. For her performance as an aged prostitute in Kei Kumai's 1975 Sandakan N° 8 she won the Best Actress Award at the 25th Berlin International Film Festival.
Tanaka died of a brain tumor on 21 March 1977.

Legacy

Director Masaki Kobayashi, to whom she was second cousin, initiated an award bearing her name. Since 1985, the Kinuyo Tanaka Award for an actress' works and career is awarded at the annual Mainichi Film Concours ceremony.
A 22-film retrospective of Tanaka's acting and directorial work, her first U.S. retrospective including U.S. premieres of her directorial efforts, was held from January 15-April 30, 1993 at Japan Society.
A wave of renewed international interest in Tanaka's work started in 2012 with a symposium and retrospective at the University of Leeds. In 2018, Irene Gonzalez-Lopez and Michael Smith published the first English-language collection on Tanaka's work and life, Tanaka Kinuyo: Nation, Stardom and Female Subjectivity.
In 2020, artistic director of the Locarno Film Festival Lili Hinstin announced a major retrospective dedicated to Tanaka actress and director, postponed in 2021 due to the Covid Pandemic situation and then cancelled after she left the festival.
In 2021, all six of the films Tanaka directed were screened theatrically in digitally remastered versions at the Cannes Film Festival and the Lyon Film Festival. Three of these films were presented in 4K restorations at the 34th Tokyo International Film Festival.

Filmography

Actress (partial)

Tanaka appeared in 258 films, not counting TV appearances.

Director (complete)

Honours and awards