Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, the prolific and instantly recognizable actor best known for his roles in the Mortal Kombat films, The Last Emperor, Memoirs of a Geisha and The Man in the High Castle, died Thursday in Santa Barbara. He was 75.
Tagawa died due to complications from a stroke early this morning surrounded by his children. His family confirmed the news to Deadline.
Tagawa is best known to a broad audience as the evil sorcerer Shang Tsung in the film, TV and video game iterations of the Mortal Kombat franchise. He began playing the character in New Line’s 1995 film adaptation and was also featured in the 1997 follow-up Mortal Kombat Annihilation. He reprised the role with guest appearances in the 2013 TV series Mortal Kombat: Legacy and one episode of Mortal Kombat X: Generations in 2015. In 2019, he voiced the character in the video game Mortal Kombat 11 and lent his physical likeness to the 2023 role-playing video game Mortal Kombat: Onslaught.
The first film grossed more than $100 million on a budget of around $20M.
“It was the perfect timing in that Mortal Kombat as a video game, at the time we did the film, was on number four or five and that the impact of the film certainly had to do with the build of the video games,” Tagawa said later.
He also credited director Paul W.S. Anderson.
“He was the first one in martial arts history to apply such music — really upbeat, driving metal music. You couldn’t sit still when you heard the music. And it matched the action so well.”
Tagawa had a key role in another film adaptation of a hit video game franchise, playing Heihachi Mishima, the evil corporate titan, in Tekken. That 1991 film did not fare was well as Mortal Combat at the box office.
Additionally, he lent his voice to the video games Soldier Boyz, Batman: Rise of Sin Tzu and World of Warcraft: Legion.
Tagawa’s breakout film was Bernardo Bertolucci’s Oscar Best Picture-winning The Last Emperor in 1987. He was cast as Chang, the emperor’s driver, who plays a small but pivotal part in the story.
A string of notable roles followed in big-budget studio pictures, many of which involve the intersection of Asian and Western cultures. They include License to Kill, Rising Sun, Snow Falling on Cedars, Pearl Harbor, Planet of the Apes, Elektra, Memoirs of a Geisha and 47 Ronin. Many of these parts utilized the actor’s facility with martial arts.
“I was born in Tokyo and began training in Kendo when I was in junior high school,” recalled Tagawa in a 2010 interview. “Then when I was five we moved to Fort Bragg, NC; and that’s when I got my first real lesson in how to use the martial arts. Being Japanese and living in the south during the ’50s was pretty tough.”
At age 21, Tagawa focused on traditional Japanese karate at the University of Southern California. He soon moved back to Japan to study under Master Nakayama with the Japan Karate Association. He later created and taught his own system of Chun-Shin, which he called “a study of energy … completely without a physical fighting concept.”
DEADLINE RELATED VIDEO:
Among the big-name directors he worked with were Philip Kaufman, Tim Burton, Michael Bay, Rob Marshall, Ivan Reitman and John Carpenter.
While many will recognize Tagawa from those A-list credits, others will doubtless have seen him in the more than 150 film, TV and video game projects in which he appeared. He got his start with an uncredited role in an 1986 box office flop that has become a cult classic: Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China. The next year his career really got going with, of course, The Last Emperor, but also guest spots on network shows MacGyver, Star Trek: The Next Generation and Miami Vice.
In 2015, Tagawa had his last major role as one of the lead characters in Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle. He played Nobusuke Tagomi, the Trade Minister of the Pacific States of America in a nation divided between Japanese and Nazi occupation after World War II. His character’s motivations and goals do not always seem to align with those of the leadership back in Tokyo.
The actor observed that there were parallels between his own life story and that of Tagomi.
“I identified so much with this character and so much of my life experience — having been born in Tokyo and then coming to America just after the war, 10 years after the war. I understood and grew up with the legacy of the war. So to be good, bad and ugly — being different — [is the same] as with my character Tagomi, who seems to be the only one running around talking about peace.”
Other notable TV appearances over his four-decade career include playing Lt. A.J. Shimamura on Nash Bridges, a major role as Captain Terry Harada on NBC’s Hawaii, six episodes as Satoshi Takeda on ABC’s Revenge, a six-episode arc on Netflix’s Lost in Space and, most recently, voicing The Swordmaker in Season 1 of Netflix’s animated Blue Eye Samurai.
Tagawa lived on the island of Kauai where he and his wife Sally raised their two children.
He is survived by three children, Calen, Brynne and Cana; and his two grandchildren, River and Thea Clayton.
