Jinpachi Nezu

Nezu broke into film and television in 1974, and for the next several decades he built a résumé that's hard to pigeonhole. Early in his career he landed roles that would have been career-defining for most actors — he appeared in Akira Kurosawa's Kagemusha (1980), the director's sprawling samurai epic about a thief who impersonates a dying warlord, and then again in Ran (1985), Kurosawa's King Lear-inspired masterpiece that remains one of the most visually arresting war films ever made. Being cast twice by Kurosawa wasn't a coincidence. It was a signal. In 1982, Nezu starred in Farewell to the Land, a film that earned enough critical attention to be entered into the 32nd Berlin International Film Festival (Wikipedia). That kind of international recognition, for a Japanese film in that era, wasn't guaranteed. Then came Gonin in 1995 — director Takashi Ishii's crime thriller about five desperate men who rob a yakuza organization — and Nezu's portrayal of Kaname Hizu gave the film much of its unnerving tension. It's the kind of performance that doesn't announce itself loudly but that you can't quite shake afterward. He'd eventually appear in more than 50 film and television productions between 1974 and 2010, though a car accident and subsequent health complications, including a muscle-related disease, forced him to step back from acting (Wikipedia). He came out of retirement once — specifically because Ishii asked him to return as Hizu for Gonin Saga (2015), the sequel made two decades after the original. Hard to say if he knew it would be his final screen appearance, but Gonin Saga turned out to be exactly that. He died the following year, on December 29, 2016.