On the screen, even his frown is a drama, and his eyes are flowing, full of majesty, depth, loneliness and a touch of warm tenderness. Complex and simple, and regarded as an international star, in Hollywood, he is arguably the most familiar Mesozoic Oriental face among Westerners. He wanders between various roles, but still retains his own color, unchanged. He is Ken Watanabe.
Ken Watanabe was born in 1959 in a small town in Niigata Prefecture to teachers, and his name is Kenshin Uesugi, a warrior general of the Echigo Sengoku period and known as the "God of War". After graduating from high school, Ken Watanabe, who liked music, originally aimed for Musashino University of Music in Tokyo, but the screening school had to have an orthodox music education, and after his father fell ill, the family's livelihood became difficult, and he could not afford to pay the high tuition fees, so he had to dispel his thoughts. However, under the experience of watching a stage play, he became very interested in acting, and as a result, he also joined the troupe, began to hone himself, and successively received performances in TV series and movies.
The moment Ken Watanabe's theatrical career began to take off was in 1987, when he starred in NHK's Okawa drama "Masamune", playing the role of Date Masamune. Although his name is derived from Uesugi Kenshin, but he is well known for playing Date Masamune, from the perspective of Japanese history fans, you may feel a little contradictory, but Watanabe Ken's portrayal of Date Masamune is still a classic version of many adaptations, the average rating of the drama that year was 39.7% (reference data website), and as of now, it still stands firmly at the top of the Okawa drama ratings.
In 1989, when Watanabe was filming the first starring movie "Heaven and Earth", he was suddenly detected to have acute bone-epiphytic leukemia, urgently switched roles, was hospitalized for treatment, and finally gradually recovered from the danger, and then threw himself into the show business circle, bringing more wonderful works to the audience.
In 2003, he starred Tom Cruise in the film The Last Samurai.
Interpreting loyalty and life, reality and ideals, following the trend of the times and the brilliant cherry blossoms with the old samurai, Watanabe cheated away the tears of too many people, regardless of east and West, men and women, young and old, he won the 2003 Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, although he ultimately missed the trophy, but also opened his popularity in Hollywood, and then took over many Hollywood movies.
Letter from Iwo Jima (2006)
Letter from Iwo Jima
In the letters from the Japanese and American troops, the instructions from their mothers were similar, and when they saw that they had completely forgotten the positions of both sides, they only saw a group of desperate people, facing the oppression of the American army and the deception of the Us army on the isolated island where the ammunition was exhausted, looking forward to the support that the rear could never deliver and the fleet that had long sunk to the bottom of the sea. In the face of the battle, the ideals and beliefs that are pale and weak, thinking about the wives, children, cats and dogs at home, considering the contents of the next family letter, looking forward to the end of the unknown time, victory, defeat or death.
2005 Batman: The Mystery of the Shadow
2005's Batman: The Shadow Mystery, Ken Watanabe as Decoy Ra's al Ghul: A member of the Shadow Warrior Alliance who replaces the leader in front of Bruce as a "spokesperson" for Duka's true identity.
Memoirs (2005)
Memoirs of a geisha
Memoirs tells the story of how a girl from a fishing village (Sayuri) grew up to become the most famous geisha in Japanese history. When Sayuri was sold as a geisha due to her family's poverty, she met the president of a company (played by Japanese actor Ken Watanabe) on the side of the road when she was most desperate, and since then her life has shone into the sun, knowing that every step she takes in the future is to get closer to the president.
Sayuri and the president have actually been fond of each other for many years, but for various reasons, neither of them confessed to each other, until they finally reunited under the cherry blossom tree, they talked to each other and embraced each other. Although it is a happy ending, this reunion is tearful to the audience, it is really not easy.
Memories of Tomorrow (2006)
After working outside for more than ten years, Watanabe Ken has not given up the Japanese market. In 2006, he performed Memories of Tomorrow, an adaptation of the japanese novelist Hiroshi Ogiwara's work of the same name, featuring Alzheimer's patients. "Even if one day your memory disappears and forgets me, I will still hold your hand like this and walk slowly." The despair and hope of Alzheimer's patients have also widely touched the audience and readers.
In fact, after Watanabe got leukemia, he once avoided patients, medical-related roles, or works related to rare and serious illnesses, but this film made him change his mind and decided to interpret the role with his own experience, and popularized the understanding and care of ordinary people for the disease through the movie. Bringing more of himself into the role, sometimes dangerous, but sometimes more moving, the film also won him the Japan Film Award for Best Actor.
2010 "Full Launch"
Ken Watanabe and Christopher Nolan collaborated on "Full Launch".
To be honest, watanabe's Hollywood works are not all masterpieces, and the situation of oriental stars in Hollywood is always very embarrassing, and must face a lot of stereotypes and inexplicable cultural differences, but Watanabe Ken is really as calm and quiet as a samurai, which makes him have a very strong sense of existence, no matter how few scenes, but they have stable value, his personality traits and temperament, so that he has only his own color.
2010 Inception
"Inception" Enjoy Saito
This is a brain-burning movie, Watanabe Ken played by Qi Teng waited in the dream for 50 years, because it is a free state, he can not know whether he is in a dream, nor dare to commit suicide, so he can only wait for 50 years, wait until Cobb, Cobb has his snake snail, persuade Qi to commit suicide back to reality, Qi returned to reality, obviously for the dream, for Cobb's bitter search for him and rescue him from the free dream, even if it is grateful, he will make a phone call, Keep your promise to return Cobb to America with his previous promise to raise his hand.
When Cobb came to his rescue, he said, "Are you here to kill me?" "He has actually been waiting for such a person who is sure to kill himself, so that he can save him from the sea of suffering and return to reality." However, this man, except Cobb, he did not believe in anyone, even himself, in his memory, Cobb should be as old as himself, so it can be considered that he understands in his heart, he cannot distinguish whether he is in a dream or in reality, so even if he wants to distinguish, he does not dare to try to die, he understands that if this is reality, he will not die in vain.
2016 Fury
In his latest work, "Fury", Ken Watanabe plays a father who is full of powerlessness about life.
In his work "Fury", Ken Watanabe plays a father who tries to care for his daughter but maintains a deep sense of powerlessness. This also makes the author want to return to reality and make some connections with the relationship between Ken Watanabe and his daughter Apricot. In 2005, Watanabe Ken made a second marriage to actress Nangobu, and the image of "loving wife" is still quite famous in the Japanese show business circle after ten years, but apricot is actually born to Ken Watanabe and his first wife. When he and his ex-wife fought a divorce lawsuit that year, Xingcai high school, his ex-wife accused him of having an affair, he could no longer tolerate his ex-wife's behavior of going into debt everywhere and indulging in religious groups, the lawsuit was entangled for two or three years, the two sides bit each other, and finally Watanabe Ken won the lawsuit and remarried with Nanguobu in the same year.
Apricot follows her mother, who takes on debt and stands on her own as a model. She is not a typical beauty, she has a momentum and personality, and later successfully stood on the international runway, and in 2006, she was selected by the American magazine "News Week" as one of the "100 Most Respected Japanese in the World" list that year, and then returned to Japan. She gave up the surname "Watanabe" and used "Apricot" as her stage name, in addition to expressing that she did not want to rely on her father, but also partly because she did not understand the backlash of her parents' dispute that year. It is difficult for the qing officials to judge the family affairs, and only the parties know best what is right and wrong, but the two have almost no indifference on the same stage, and the deliberate fading of Watanabe's humble color, from the father's point of view, must be an obvious regret.
It wasn't until Apricot and actor Higashi Gotta got married and had children that the relationship became softer. This year, when Watanabe went on a variety show to promote his works, the host jokingly asked him how he felt when he was a grandfather, only to see him playfully talk about the anecdotes of his daughter's childbirth, and said that he hated being called "Grandpa", so he preferred his grandchildren to call him "J" (じいさん was pronounced J at the beginning), which caused a burst of laughter. When he mentioned his daughter, he said with emotion and relief: "(At that time) his face was full of the expression of becoming a mother." The special emotions and subtle changes between him and his daughter have allowed him to experience how much, and how much has he put into his acting skills? When I watched "Fury", I couldn't help but expand other thinking spaces.
Watanabe Ken's drama inside and outside the play, there are ups and downs like a roller coaster life. At the beginning of 2016, he found that he had early stomach cancer and had to suspend his plan to star in the Stage Drama "The King and Me" in the United States, and after surgery and convalescence, he continued to stand up and go to the United States to complete his stage performance.
2019 Godzilla 2
Godzilla 2
In the 14 years of vicissitudes, when Zhang Ziyi and Ken Watanabe reunited in "Godzilla 2", the two were already full of life experience. I believe that Zhang Ziyi embraced Watanabe In the film and burst into tears not only because of the needs of the plot, but also the true feelings of infinite emotions such as the passage of time and the old friends becoming old.
After "Memoirs", the two embraced the "memory killing" again across 14 years of time and space. Unlike the happy hug at the final reunion of "Memoirs", this hug in "Godzilla 2" means farewell forever.
But he still does not stop, still like a samurai, continues to fight at various forks in his life, with his quiet and calm posture, not falling, so it is more exciting to see where he will go next.