Chieko Nakakita(1926-2005)

A character actress who never quite got her due, despite roles in numerous high-profile movies from the 1940s onward. Although a vigorous participant in Toho's labor disputes of that early period, like so many others she never really left, in part because she had married studio producer Tomoyuki Tanaka. An excellent performer with a lively and genuine presence, Nakakita was never fated for great stardom, although Akira Kurosawa early on spotted her potential as a realistic romantic lead, and cast her as the optimistic girlfriend in Un merveilleux dimanche (1947). A superlative later performance appeared in La Dernière Guerre de l'Apocalypse (1961), in which she essayed the role of a single mother vainly struggling across Tokyo to be reunited with her young daughter before war breaks out. For the most part however, she appeared to come to regard acting as more of a hobby than a profession, turning up in bit roles for Toho movies of all kinds, usually in the kind of maternal roles for which she was extremely suited, many of them produced by her husband, although it would be mistaken to assume that someone with her obvious talent had to rely on Tanaka just to get a job. By the end of the 1960s she appears to have retired altogether, and concentrated on her family.