Hideko Takamine

Abstract

AT SEVENTY, she's Japan's greatest living actress, often compared to Mary Pickford, but more like a Katherine Hepburn for the range of her talent and commanding presence of the screen -- Hideko Takamine. Despite being recognized as a screen immortal in Japan, only a handful of her more than three hundred film appearances are known in the United States, due to the tragic destruction of the Japanese film archives during the war. Thus she's known in the West mostly by her postwar films, made during that last great period of Japanese cinema of the 1950s and early 1960s, after which television was to replace moviegoing as the population's favourite form of entertainment. Rather late in her career, Takamine did venture into television, but was never satisfied with the results. Finally, in 1979, deciding that the new medium was not for her, she gracefully took leave of the screen to...