Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, the prolific and immediately recognizable actor greatest identified for his roles within the Mortal Kombat movies, The Final Emperor, Memoirs of a Geisha and The Man within the Excessive Fortress, died Thursday in Santa Barbara. He was 75.
Tagawa died as a consequence of problems from a stroke early this morning surrounded by his kids. His household confirmed the information to Deadline.
Tagawa is greatest identified to a broad viewers because the evil sorcerer Shang Tsung within the movie, TV and online game iterations of the Mortal Kombat franchise. He started enjoying the character in New Line’s 1995 movie adaptation and was additionally featured within the 1997 follow-up Mortal Kombat Annihilation. He reprised the function with visitor appearances within the 2013 TV sequence Mortal Kombat: Legacy and one episode of Mortal Kombat X: Generations in 2015. In 2019, he voiced the character within the online game Mortal Kombat 11 and lent his bodily likeness to the 2023 role-playing online game Mortal Kombat: Onslaught.
The primary movie grossed greater than $100 million on a finances of round $20M.
“It was the proper timing in that Mortal Kombat as a online game, on the time we did the movie, was on quantity 4 or 5 and that the influence of the movie definitely needed to do with the construct of the video video games,” Tagawa stated later.
He additionally credited director Paul W.S. Anderson.
“He was the primary one in martial arts historical past to use such music — actually upbeat, driving steel music. You couldn’t sit nonetheless if you heard the music. And it matched the motion so effectively.”
Tagawa had a key function in one other movie adaptation of successful online game franchise, enjoying Heihachi Mishima, the evil company titan, in Tekken. That 1991 movie didn’t fare was effectively as Mortal Fight on the field workplace.
Moreover, he lent his voice to the video video games Soldier Boyz, Batman: Rise of Sin Tzu and World of Warcraft: Legion.
Tagawa’s breakout movie was Bernardo Bertolucci’s Oscar Greatest Image-winning The Final Emperor in 1987. He was forged as Chang, the emperor’s driver, who performs a small however pivotal half within the story.
A string of notable roles adopted in big-budget studio footage, a lot of which contain the intersection of Asian and Western cultures. They embrace License to Kill, Rising Solar, Snow Falling on Cedars, Pearl Harbor, Planet of the Apes, Elektra, Memoirs of a Geisha and 47 Ronin. Many of those components utilized the actor’s facility with martial arts.
“I used to be born in Tokyo and commenced coaching in Kendo after I was in junior highschool,” recalled Tagawa in a 2010 interview. “Then after I was 5 we moved to Fort Bragg, NC; and that’s after I bought my first actual lesson in use the martial arts. Being Japanese and dwelling within the south throughout the ’50s was fairly robust.”
At age 21, Tagawa targeted on conventional Japanese karate on the College of Southern California. He quickly moved again to Japan to review underneath Grasp Nakayama with the Japan Karate Affiliation. He later created and taught his personal system of Chun-Shin, which he referred to as “a research of vitality … fully and not using a bodily combating idea.”
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Among the many big-name administrators he labored with had been Philip Kaufman, Tim Burton, Michael Bay, Rob Marshall, Ivan Reitman and John Carpenter.
Whereas many will acknowledge Tagawa from these A-list credit, others will probably have seen him within the greater than 150 movie, TV and online game tasks by which he appeared. He bought his begin with an uncredited function in an 1986 field workplace flop that has develop into a cult basic: Carpenter’s Huge Hassle in Little China. The following 12 months his profession actually bought going with, in fact, The Final Emperor, but additionally visitor spots on community reveals MacGyver, Star Trek: The Subsequent Era and Miami Vice.
In 2015, Tagawa had his final main function as one of many lead characters in Amazon’s The Man within the Excessive Fortress. He performed Nobusuke Tagomi, the Commerce Minister of the Pacific States of America in a nation divided between Japanese and Nazi occupation after World Warfare II. His character’s motivations and targets don’t all the time appear to align with these of the management again in Tokyo.
The actor noticed that there have been parallels between his personal life story and that of Tagomi.
“I recognized a lot with this character and a lot of my life expertise — having been born in Tokyo after which coming to America simply after the warfare, 10 years after the warfare. I understood and grew up with the legacy of the warfare. So to be good, unhealthy and ugly — being completely different — [is the same] as with my character Tagomi, who appears to be the one one operating round speaking about peace.”
Different notable TV appearances over his four-decade profession embrace enjoying Lt. A.J. Shimamura on Nash Bridges, a serious function as Captain Terry Harada on NBC’s Hawaii, six episodes as Satoshi Takeda on ABC’s Revenge, a six-episode arc on Netflix’s Misplaced in House and, most lately, voicing The Swordmaker in Season 1 of Netflix’s animated Blue Eye Samurai.
Tagawa lived on the island of Kauai the place he and his spouse Sally raised their two kids.
He’s survived by three kids, Calen, Brynne and Cana; and his two grandchildren, River and Thea Clayton.
