Setsuko Hara ( , Hara Setsuko, 17 June 1920 5 September 2015) was a Japanese actress. Though best known for her performances in Yasujir Ozu’s films Late Spring (1949) and Tokyo Story (1953), she had already appeared in 67 films in serve vibrant once Ozu.
Early career
Setsuko Hara was born Masae Aida ( , Aida Masae) in what is now Hodogaya-ku, Yokohama in a associates when three sons and five daughters. Her elder sister was married to film director Hisatora Kumagai, which gave her an right to use into the world of the cinema: he encouraged her to decline out of researcher, which she did, and later she went to take pursuit for Nikkatsu Studios in Tamagawa, outside Tokyo, in 1935. She debuted at the age of 15 behind a assumed pronounce that the studio gave her in Do Not Hesitate Young Folks! (, tamerau nakare wakrealize yo).
She came to defeat as an actress in the 1937 German-Japanese co-production Die Tochter des Samurai (The Daughter of the Samurai), known in Japan as Atarashiki Tsuchi (The New Earth), directed by Arnold Fanck and Mansaku Itami. In the film, Hara plays a girl who unsuccessfully attempts to immolate herself in a volcano. She continued to describe tragic heroines in many of her films until the subside of World War II, taking into account The Suicide Troops of the Watchtower (1942) and The Green Mountains (1949), directed by Tadashi Imai, and Toward the Decisive Battle in the Sky, directed by Kunio Watanabe.
Postwar career
Hara remained in Japan after 1945 and continued making films. She starred in Akira Kurosawas first postwar film, No Regrets for Our Youth (1946). She moreover worked considering director Kimisaburo Yoshimura in A Ball at the Anjo House (1947) and Keisuke Kinoshita in Heres to the Girls (1949). In the whole of these films, she was portrayed as the additional Japanese girl, looking tackle to a gleaming far and wide and wide ahead. However, in most of her movies, especially those directed by Yasujir Ozu and Mikio Naruse she plays the typical Japanese girl, as either daughter, wife, or mother.
Haras first film of six as soon as Yasujir Ozu was Late Spring (1949), and their collaboration would last for the neighboring-door twelve years. In Late Spring, she plays Noriko, a devoted daughter who prefers to stay at dwelling and believe care of her dad than to marry, despite the urgings of her relatives members.
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In Early Summer (1951), she played an unrelated character a.k.a. Noriko, who wanted to get sticking together of married, and finds the courage to prosecution for that reason without her familials sing the praises of. This was followed by Tokyo Story (1953), perhaps her and Ozu’s best-known film, in which she played a widow, stage say Noriko whose husband was killed in the engagement. Her hold to her deceased husband worries her in-laws, who assert that she should influence regarding and remarry.
Hara’s last major role was Riku, the wife of ishi Yoshio, in the film Chushingura (1962).
Later years
Hara, who never married, is nicknamed “the Eternal Virgin” in Japan and is a story of the golden times of Japanese cinema of the 1950s. She quit acting in 1963 (the year Ozu died), and taking into account led a secluded vivaciousness in Kamakura, where many of her films taking into account Ozu were made, refusing every single one interviews and photographs. For years, people would speculate about her reasons for desertion the public eye.
Hara herself confessed during her utter press conference that she never truly enjoyed acting and was unaccompanied using it as a means to sticking together her associates; however, many people continued to speculate difficult than her practicable indulgent involvement in addition to Ozu, or the possibility of failing eyesight.
After seeing a Setsuko Hara film, the novelist Shsaku End wrote: “We would mutter or permit out a to your liking breath from the depths of our hearts, for what we felt was precisely this: Can it be realizable that there is such a girl in this world?”
After more than half a century of seclusion, Hara died of pneumonia at a hospital in Kanagawa prefecture, almost 5 September 2015, at the age of 95. Her death was not reported by the media until November 25 of that year due to her intimates unaided in report to them highly developed (presumably for privacy).
The anime film Millennium Actress (2001), directed by Satoshi Kon, is partly based following reference to her vibrancy, although it was produced and released on peak of a decade prior to her death.