Eitaro Ozawa, born in Tokyo in 1909, was one of Japan's most prolific and reliable character actors from the postwar decades until his death in 1988. He played Taro, the older captive brother, in Kenji Mizoguchi's Sansho the Bailiff (1954) and appeared as the manipulative merchant Kayama in the same director's Street of Shame (1956). He also lent weight to Akira Kurosawa's The Idiot (1951). Grounded in progressive theatre, he brought clean intelligence and understated menace to leftist dramas, jidaigeki and shomingeki alike. Read more