Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, Actor of Mortal Kombat and The Last Emperor, Dies at 75
According to CinemaDrame News Agency, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, the American–Japanese actor known for Mortal Kombat, The Last Emperor, and The Man in the High Castle, passed away last Thursday at the age of 75. Sally Phillips, his former wife and mother of their two children, confirmed his death in California in a statement.
Born on 27 September 1950 in Tokyo to a Japanese actress, Tagawa spent his childhood moving across U.S. states due to his father’s military career. He grew up in North Carolina, Louisiana, and Texas before settling in Southern California.
He had said that the U.S. policy of Japanese internment during World War II cast a long shadow over his life. In 2001, Tagawa recalled: “We know Japanese people weren’t exactly welcomed after the war. I lived in the American South ten years after it ended. I know how to face impossible odds. I’m the kind of person who, if told the chance is one in a million, says ‘I’ll take it.’ And if they say it’s zero in a million, I’ll say ‘I’ll make one’—and take that too. So nothing can stop me.”
In 1987, he appeared before the camera for Bernardo Bertolucci in The Last Emperor, a biographical film about the final emperor of China. Tagawa said in 2015: “It was thrilling. Suddenly I was working with one of the world’s top ten directors. And we were shooting in China. I almost wanted to ask how much I had to pay to be part of it. It was like a dream come true.”
Tagawa later portrayed Shang Tsung in the 1995 film Mortal Kombat, based on the Sega video game franchise. His other credits included Licence to Kill, Pearl Harbor, Rising Sun, Memoirs of a Geisha, Planet of the Apes, and the series Nash Bridges, Heroes, and Revenge.
