Nobuo Nakamura | WatchedThis
Nobuo Nakamura
Acting
Biography
Nobuo Nakamura (中村伸郎 Nakamura Nobuo, September 14, 1908–July 5, 1991 ) was a Japanese actor, who made notable appearances in the films of Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu in the 1950s and 1960s. Perhaps his most famous roles were those of the callous deputy mayor in Kurosawa's Ikiru (1952), and the hairdresser's henpecked husband in Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953). Nakamura is famous for many notable performances in theatre. In 1937, he founded the Bungakuza company along with Haruko Sugimura, Seiji Miyaguchi, and Masayuki Mori. Nakamura played Polonius in Hamlet, Herod in Wilde's Salome, Aleksandr Vladimirovich Serebryakov in Chekov's Uncle Vanya, and Krapp in Krapp's Last Tape. He also appeared in Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, and The Cherry Orchard . In the 1950s and 1960s, he played major roles in Yukio Mishima's plays such as Rokumeikan, My Friend Hitler, and so on. In 1963, Nakamura left Bungakuza company and founded the NLT company with Mishima. His most famous and successful role is considered to be The Professor in Ionesco's The Lesson. He performed The Lesson for the first time in 1972 and had played The Professor every Friday night at a small theatre in Shibuya, Tokyo until 1983. Description above from the Wikipedia article Nobuo Nakamura, licensed under CC-BY-SA,full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Filmography Movies
Acting
Frankenstein Conquers the World
During WWII, Germans obtain the immortal heart of Frankenstein's monster and transport it to Japan to prevent it being seized by the Allies. Kept in a Hiroshima laboratory, it is seeming lost when the United States destroys the city with the atomic bomb. Years later a wild boy is discovered wandering the streets of the city alone, born of the immortal heart.
Ikiru
Kanji Watanabe is a middle-aged man who has worked in the same monotonous bureaucratic position for decades. Learning he has cancer, he starts to look for the meaning of his life.
Late Autumn
A woman and her daughter are each forced to contend with an increasing pressure to marry, particularly from three men who knew her late husband.
The Human Condition I: No Greater Love
After handing in a report on the treatment of Chinese colonial labor, Kaji is offered the post of labour chief at a large mining operation in Manchuria, which also grants him exemption from military service. He accepts and moves with his newlywed wife Michiko, but when he tries to put his ideas of more humane treatment into practice, he finds himself at odds with scheming officials, cruel foremen, and the military police.
The Bad Sleep Well
In this loose adaptation of "Hamlet," illegitimate son Kôichi Nishi climbs to a high position within a Japanese corporation and marries the crippled daughter of company vice president Iwabuchi. At the reception, the wedding cake is a replica of their corporate headquarters, but an aspect of the design reminds the party of the hushed-up death of Nishi's father. It is then that Nishi unleashes his plan to avenge his father's death.
Tampopo
In this humorous paean to the joys of food, a pair of truck drivers happen onto a decrepit roadside shop selling ramen noodles. The widowed owner, Tampopo, begs them to help her turn her establishment into a paragon of the "art of noodle-soup making". Interspersed are satirical vignettes about the importance of food to different aspects of human life.
High and Low
A Yokohama shoe executive faces a wrenching choice when kidnappers mistakenly seize his chauffeur’s son but demand the ransom anyway.
Dogora
A floating amorphous life-form descends from the atmosphere to consume carbon in the form of diamonds.
Tokyo Story
The elderly Shukishi and his wife, Tomi, take the long journey from their small seaside village to visit their adult children in Tokyo. Their elder son, Koichi, a doctor, and their daughter, Shige, a hairdresser, don't have much time to spend with their aged parents, and so it falls to Noriko, the widow of their younger son who was killed in the war, to keep her in-laws company.
Gallery
