Setsuko Hara, 95; Japanese film star . NEW YORK - Setsuko Hara, an
actress best known for her subtle portrayals of women torn between the
demands of family and their own desires, particularly in movies such as
"Late Spring," "Tokyo Story," and others directed by Yasujiro Ozu, died
Sept. 5 in Kamakura, near Tokyo. She was 95. Ms. Hara began acting at
15 and appeared in her first major role in 1937 in "New Earth," a
German-Japanese co-production in which she played a young woman who,
rejected by her fiancé, tries to throw herself into a volcano.
Advertisement After making wartime propaganda films, she appeared in
Akira Kurosawa's first postwar film, "No Regrets for Our Youth,"
playing the idealistic daughter of a college professor, who, in the
Japan of the 1930s, throws in her lot with a leftist student opposed to
the country's militarism. Her 12-year collaboration with Ozu began in
1949 with "Late Spring," widely regarded, like "Tokyo Story," as one of
the director's supreme achievements. Ms. Hara played a young woman,
Noriko, who ignores her family's pleas that she marry, choosing instead
to care for her widowed father, partly out of devotion, partly out of
fear of the world outside her home. In "Tokyo Story" (1953), a
perennial on critics' short lists of the greatest films ever made, Ms.
Hara played the widowed daughter-in-law of an elderly couple who come
to visit their children in Tokyo, but find tenderness and devotion only
in the woman who married their son, a casualty of the war. "Like Garbo,
Hara came to represent an ideal of womanliness, nobility and
generosity," David Thomson wrote in The New Biographical Dictionary of
Film. And like Garbo, she held her public at a distance. Not long after
working with Ozu on his penultimate film, "The End of Summer" (1961),
she left the cinema abruptly, implying, in her final news conference,
that she had acted in films only to help support her large extended
family. She lived the rest of her life in seclusion in Kamakura.
Takashi Kondo, deputy culture editor of Yomiuri Shimbun, recalled on
the newspaper's English-language website that he had visited her home
several times, only to be turned away by a relative who told him,
"She's here and in good health" and "She doesn't give any interviews.
One of his reporters, he said, did coax a few words out of Ms. Hara in
a 1992 telephone conversation. "I was not the only star shining," she
told him. "Back then, everyone was shining. Masae Aida was born on June
17, 1920, in Yokohama. She was given a stage name when she began
working at age 15 for Nikkatsu Studios, having dropped out of high
school with the encouragement of her brother-in-law, the director
Hisatora Kumagai. She made her debut in "Do Not Hesitate, Young Folks!
Her flair for portraying tragic heroines with an inflexible sense of
duty made her an ideal star in wartime films like "The Suicide Troops
of the Watchtower" (1942), directed by Tadashi Imai, with whom she
would later make "The Green Mountains" (1949), and "Toward the Decisive
Battle in the Sky," directed by Kunio Watanabe. Her wartime films were
featured in March in a series at the Japan Society, "The Most
Beautiful: The War Films of Shirley Yamaguchi and Setsuko Hara.
Yamaguchi died last year. Two of her films captured the rigors of the
immediate postwar years and the possibility of renewal amid the ruins.
In "A Ball at the Anjo House" (1947), directed by Kimisaburo Yoshimura,
Ms. Hara played the daughter in a cultured family, ruined by the war,
that must give up its mansion and find a new way to live. A more
satiric role came in Keisuke Kinoshita's "Here's to the Girls" (1949),
in which she was the daughter of a down-at-the-heels aristocratic
family, and was romantically paired with an uncouth factory owner.
"Every Japanese actor can play the role of a soldier, and every
Japanese actress can play the role of a prostitute to some extent," Ozu
said of her. "However, it is rare to find an actress who can play the
role of a daughter from a good family. Ms. Hara, who never married and
leaves no survivors, made more than 100 films.
