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Known For

Setsuko Hara is known for:

  • Late Spring
    Noriko is perfectly happy living at home with her widowed father, Shukichi, and has no plans to marry -- that is, until her aunt Masa convinces Shukichi that unless he marries off his 27-year-old daughter soon, she will likely remain alone for the rest of her life. When Noriko resists Masa's matchmaking, Shukichi is forced to deceive his daughter and sacrifice his own happiness to do what he believes is right.
  • Tokyo Story
    The elderly Shukishi and his wife, Tomi, take the long journey from their small seaside village to visit their adult children in Tokyo. Their elder son, Koichi, a doctor, and their daughter, Shige, a hairdresser, don't have much time to spend with their aged parents, and so it falls to Noriko, the widow of their younger son who was killed in the war, to keep her in-laws company.
  • Early Summer
    Noriko lives in postwar Tokyo with her extended family. Although she enjoys her career and her friends, her more traditionally minded family worries about the fact that she's still single at the advanced age of 28. When 40-year-old business associate Takako proposes marriage, Noriko's family press her into accepting. But when her widowed childhood friend Kenkichi returns to the neighborhood, she finds her heart leading in another direction.

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Biography

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Setsuko Hara (June 17, 1920 – September 5, 2015) was a Japanese actress who appeared in six of Yasujirō Ozu's films, most notably as Noriko in the 'Noriko Trilogy': Late Spring (1949), Early Summer (1951) and Tokyo Story (1953). Her other films for Ozu were Tokyo Twilight (1957), Late Autumn (1960) and finally The End of Summer in 1961. She was born  Masae Aida in Yokohama, Kanagawa prefecture. She came to prominence as an actress at an early age, in the 1937 German-Japanese co-production Die Tochter des Samurai (Daughter of the Samurai), known in Japan as Atarashiki Tsuchi (The New Earth), directed by Arnold Fanck and Mansaku Itami. She also starred in films by Akira Kurosawa, Mikio Naruse and other prominent directors. She was called "the Eternal Virgin" in Japan and is a symbol of the golden era of Japanese cinema of the 1950s, although she is mostly unknown in the US. She suddenly quit acting in 1963 (the same year as Ozu's death), and had since led a secluded life in Kamakura, refusing all interviews and photographs. Her last major role was Riku, wife of Ōishi Yoshio, in the 1962 film, Chushingura. She was the inspiration for the protagonist of the 2001 movie Millennium Actress. Description above from the Wikipedia article Setsuko Hara, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.