Noriko Sengoku

Born Reiko Mori in Tokyo in 1922, Noriko Sengoku made her film debut in 1947 and spent the following decade inside the best run in Japanese cinema without ever being its subject. She had belonged to the touring theatre company Sakura-tai, which was destroyed in the Hiroshima bombing; she was away from the city when it happened.

Kurosawa used her repeatedly in his early sound-era pictures: Gin in Drunken Angel, an apprentice nurse in The Quiet Duel, the girl in Stray Dog, Sumie in Scandal, Takako in The Idiot, a farm household wife in Seven Samurai, Kimie Nakajima in I Live in Fear. Almost none of these are large roles, and that was the point. She was the actress you cast when a scene needed a real person standing in it, and by her own account she was proud of the position: a supporting player is one of the screws in the corners of a frame, and if a single one works loose the whole thing comes apart. She was particularly good at the sour landlady register, the woman who has counted your money before you have sat down.

Her range beyond Kurosawa is wider than the shorthand allows. She is in Naruse's Floating Clouds and When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, Ozu's The Munekata Sisters, Kobayashi's Kwaidan, Masumura's Blind Beast, and, because a working actress takes the work, a delegate in Invasion of Astro-Monster. Descriptions of her tend to stop in the 1960s. The credits do not: she is still turning up in the 1980s and 1990s and as late as Tokyo Towers in 2007. She died in 2012.