【日本傳奇女星 高峰秀子 病逝】
主演成瀨巳喜男經典名作《浮雲》、《放浪記》 及《女人上階梯》的女星 高峰秀子 2010年十一月病逝.
上週才剛看過她主演的描繪東洋小說名家林芙美子自傳作放浪記.
今日就由衛報傳來了她的死訊,真是遺憾.
我上列的三部片,個人以為均屬東洋電影之最優作;請參衛報該文,寫得極好.

不能不說,衛報真是當今報紙之翹楚----影視文章視野遼闊無比!


Hideko Takamine in When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960).
‘Once I’m up, I can take whatever happens’. Photograph:
Ronald Grant Archive


Although Japan had been making films since the beginnings of cinema,
Japanese films remained virtually unknown in the west
for more than half a century.
Shamefully, it has taken almost as long again to recognise the greatness
of the director Mikio Naruse,
and consequently the remarkable talents of Hideko Takamine,
his leading lady in more than a dozen films,
who has died of lung cancer aged 86.

In the same way as Kinuyo Tanaka became associated with the films
of Kenji Mizoguchi, and Setsuko Hara with those of Yasujiro Ozu,
Takamine embodied Naruse's heroines – courageous, independent,
strong-willed, conscientious women, faced with misfortune.
Naruse once remarked about his female characters:
"If they try to move forward even a little, they quickly hit a wall."
The director Akira Kurosawa's description of Naruse's films as "looking calm and ordinary at first glance but which reveal themselves to be like deep rivers with a quiet surface disguising a fast-raging current" could equally apply to Takamine's luminous performances.

Naruse and Takamine had an exceptional way of working together. He would go through the script page by page with her, crossing out patches of dialogue that she could render without words, or by a glance, or by a gesture, or simply by her presence. "Even during the shooting of a picture, he would never say if anything was good or bad, interesting or trite," Takamine once explained. "He was a completely unresponsive director. I appeared in many of his films, and yet there was never an instance in which he gave me any acting instructions."

Born in Hakodate, the daughter of poor parents, Takamine, who never attended school, made her screen debut at the age of five in a silent drama, Mother (1929). For the next few years, her popularity increased as a child star, especially at the Toho studios in Tokyo, where she appeared in an average of four films a year under directors such as Kajiro Yamamoto, Kurosawa's mentor. It was Yamamoto who directed Takamine in one of her biggest successes in her teens, Uma (1941), in which she played the daughter of a family of poor farmers, who raises a horse from birth but has to sell it to the army against her will.

So popular was Takamine that the title of the first film in which she was directed by Naruse, Hideko the Bus Conductress (1941), had her name in the title and not that of the character. However, it was more than a decade later that she became Naruse's leading lady in his shomin-geki films, a genre that concerned itself with precise delineations of the lower middle classes.

Apart from Naruse, Takamine worked with some of the best Japanese directors, most often as a liberated woman. In Ozu's The Munekata Sisters (1950), she plays a free-spirited modern girl, in contrast to her more traditional kimono-wearing older sister. (Takamine had appeared as a seven-year-old in Ozu's Tokyo Chorus, 1931.) In the title role of Keisuke Kinoshita's Carmen Comes Home (1951), the first Japanese feature in colour, Takamine is effective as the flighty heroine, a pretty Tokyo stripper who pays a visit to the village where she grew up, scandalising the community. She continued to show her comic flair as a vivacious salesgirl in Heinosuke Gosho's Four Chimneys (1953), one of the best examples of "Goshoism", a distinctive blend of comedy and pathos. There was pathos aplenty in Kinoshita's Twenty-Four Eyes (1954), in which Takamine played a dedicated unmarried schoolteacher, one of her most popular films.

But her talents are best demonstrated in Naruse's subtle, pessimistic melodramas starting with Lightning (1952) in which she plays the youngest sibling in conflict with her mother, which comes to a head in a heartrending climax. In Floating Clouds (1955), she plays a solitary woman returning to Japan after serving as a nurse at the front in south-east Asia, who seeks out a soldier with whom she fell in love there. But the couple have no control over their destiny because he cannot leave his disabled wife.

In Flowing (1956), Takamine is the daughter of the owner of a Tokyo geisha house who, though trained as a geisha, refuses to practise the trade. "I can't pretend feelings I don't have," she says, being liberated enough not to want to be a geisha, but not enough to have any other occupation.

When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960) finds her as an ageing (30-year-old) bar hostess who narrates her everyday existence in her basement flat and work in the bar above. "After it gets dark, I have to climb the stairs, and that's what I hate. But once I'm up, I can take whatever happens." In Yearning (1964), her penultimate film with Naruse, she is an archetypical war widow battling to adjust to life.

Takamine published several books, including a two-volume autobiography, My Professional Diary (1976). In 1955 she married the director and prolific screenwriter Zenzo Matsuyama, stating that she wanted to "create a new style of wife who has a job". Matsuyama, who directed her in half-a-dozen films, survives her.

• Hideko Takamine, actor, born 27 March 1924; died 28 December 2010