Kyōko Kagawa
Japanese actress
Kyōko Kagawa (香川 京子, Kagawa Kyōko; born 5 December 1931) is a Japanese actress. During her career spanning 70 years, she has worked with directors like Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujirō Ozu and Mikio Naruse, appearing in films such as Tokyo Story, Sansho the Bailiff, The Bad Sleep Well, Mothra, and High and Low.
Biography
Kagawa was born in Asō (currently Namegata), Ibaraki Prefecture, and graduated from Tokyo Metropolitan Tenth High School for Girls in 1949. She was discovered in the "New Face Nomination" contest run by the Tokyo Shimbun in 1949 and gave her film debut the following year in Mado kara tobidase. A prolific actress, she collaborated with directors like Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujirō Ozu, Mikio Naruse, Kinuyo Tanaka, Hiroshi Shimizu, Shiro Toyoda, Kozaburo Yoshimura, Ishiro Honda, Yuzo Kawashima, Hiroshi Inagaki and Hirokazu Koreeda.
Kagawa married in 1963. After appearing in Kurosawa's Red Beard (1965), she followed her husband, a reporter for the Yomiuri Shimbun, to New York. Upon her return, she acted in television dramas until she appeared again on the big screen in Satsuo Yamamoto's Karei-naru Ichizoku (1974).
In 2011, the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, honored her long career and contribution to Japanese cinema with an exhibition dedicated to her.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Kyōko Kagawa” is japanese actress. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Kyōko, Kagawa and Japanese, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “japanese actress” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3201022. VIAF identifies the subject as 85118245. The Library of Congress control number is nr92043289. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1931, 1949, 1963 and 1965.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kyōko Kagawa” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.