Machiko Kyō

Machiko Kyo, born Motoko Yano, worked with more of the major Japanese directors inside a single decade than most actors meet in a lifetime. Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, Ozu, Naruse, Ichikawa, Kinugasa, Yoshimura, Toyoda and Teshigahara all cast her, and her run of films from 1950 to 1960 reads like a syllabus of postwar Japanese cinema. She was also sold hard as a star, marketed as one of the first sex symbols the Japanese studio system produced, which is part of why it took so long for the acting to be discussed seriously.

The specific skill was an ambiguity the camera cannot settle. In Rashomon she plays the wife whose account of what happened in the grove contradicts every other account, and the film only functions because she gives each version its own full conviction. In Ugetsu she is Lady Wakasa, a noblewoman whose courtship of a village potter is seductive and wrong in the same gesture. In Gate of Hell she is Lady Kesa, cornered by a samurai who will not accept that she is already married. Three portraits of a woman being looked at, and she plays the looking differently every time.

She widened rather than faded. Mizoguchi's Street of Shame put her in a Tokyo brothel as Mickey, the loudest and most modern woman in the house. Ozu used her in Floating Weeds, Ichikawa in Odd Obsession, Teshigahara in The Face of Another, all colder and more clinical registers. Hollywood borrowed her for The Teahouse of the August Moon. Television work carried on into the 1990s.