Koji Yakusho

Born in Isahaya, Nagasaki Prefecture. Debuted in 1979. Koji Yakusho won the Elan d’or Prize, the Television Grand Prix, and other newcomer awards for his role as Oda Nobunaga in the NHK historical drama Tokugawa Ieyasu (1983). After appearing in films such as Juzo Itami’s Tampopo (1985), he had his first starring role in a film in Another Way: D-Kikan Joho (1988), based on the novel by Kyotaro Nishimura. The hit Shall We Dance? followed in 1996, which was later remade in Hollywood. The next year, Lost Paradise was another success, while The Eel won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Since then, Yakusho has been an integral part of films by Shinji Aoyama and Kiyoshi Kurosawa, including Eureka (2000), which won the FIPRESCI Prize and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at Cannes. He has also received international acclaim for roles in the Academy Award-nominated Babel (2006) and Chronicle of My Mother (2012), which won the Special Grand Prix of the Jury at the Montreal World Film Festival, and has become a leading Japanese actor in both name and reality. In 2009, he made his directorial debut with Toad’s Oil (2009), in which he also starred. In 2019, he received his third best actor prize at the Japan Academy Awards for The Blood of Lone Wolves (2018) following Shall We Dance? and The Eel.