When Ken Watanabe was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Golden Globe and an Oscar for his role as Lord Katsumoto in 2003’s The Last Samurai, he easily became the best-known Japanese actor in the world. “Acting in English for the first time proved to be a difficult challenge,” he told the LA Times at the time. “I tried to act normally as I always do in my native language and live as my character Katsumoto in the most natural way possible.” He described the grueling physical training required for the role in this way: “I just kept training, every day for six weeks, while we were shooting the action scenes. And I felt that the door of opportunity really opened up for me.”

And open it did. A career in Hollywood soon followed with roles in Memoirs of a Geisha and Batman Begins both in 2005, Letters from Iwo Jima in 2006, Inception (2010), Godzilla (2014), Bel Canto (2018) and Godzilla: King of the Monsters in 2019. He also voiced Decepticon in Transformers: Age of Extinction and Transformers: The Last Knight. IN 2004, Watanabe was named one of People magazine’s 50 Most Beautiful People.

Christopher Nolan told the HFPA why he worked twice with Watanabe. “I found him a pleasure to work with. An extremely charismatic performer. A truly iconic presence. When it came time to write this script, I was grasping for a character who could be ambiguous in the way that Ken’s character is in the beginning. You don’t quite know what to make of him. Is he the good guy or the bad guy? I really was excited about the idea of working with Ken again. Every shot really, the way he uses physicality, the way he moves, the way he speaks, everything is quite extraordinary.”

Watanabe earned a Tony nomination in 2015, the first for a Japanese actor, for his performance as the King of Siam in the revival of the Broadway musical The King and I opposite Kelli O’Hara. The show subsequently ran at the West End in London.

Born in 1959 to a school teacher mother and a calligrapher father, Watanabe planned to be a musician at a conservatory in Tokyo as he had played the trumpet since he was a child. But his family’s financial circumstances meant it wasn’t possible to fund his music tuition. He moved to Tokyo in the early 1980s after high school and began an acting career on stage with the En company. Roles on television and film followed, and he became famous throughout Japan for his samurai parts in historical dramas such as Oda Nobunaga and Bakumatsu Junjo Den. Nominated several times for the Japanese Academy Awards, he won Best Lead Actor for his role as an Alzheimer’s patient in Memories of Tomorrow (Ashita No Kioku) in 2006.

Health problems interrupted his career several times. He was diagnosed with leukemia in 1989, which recurred in 1994, and stomach cancer in 2016, both of which he has recovered from. In his 2006 biography Dare – Who Am I? he revealed a hepatitis C condition.

Unfortunately, the coronavirus pandemic shut down a planned stage performance in Japan in 2020. Watanabe was rehearsing the role of Spanish conquistador Pizarro in an adaptation of Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt of the Sun for the newly restored Parco Theater in Tokyo when the play was canceled just before opening. It was to be a huge production with a cast of 30 and was to have been directed by Will Tuckett, dancer, and choreographer of the Royal Ballet.

Watanabe will next be seen in the upcoming ten-part television series Tokyo Vice opposite Ansel Elgort for HBO Max, in a show about a journalist embedded in the Tokyo vice squad. He is also signed up for the remake of The Fugitive for Japan’s TV Asahi, reprising the role that Harrison Ford made famous in the 1993 film.