Communicants

JAPAN’S most distinguished living actor, Tatsuya Nakadai, has made well over 100 movies, and he’s still probably best known to American audiences for a role in which he is nearly unrecognizable. As Hidetora, the 80-something feudal patriarch of the Ichimonji clan in Akira Kurosawa’s “Ran” (1985), Mr. Nakadai — then in his early 50s — wore heavy makeup intended not only to age him but also to resemble a Noh mask. In an interview conducted three years ago for the Criterion DVD release of the film he said, “They had to draw in every single wrinkle; the only parts of that face that were actually mine were the eyes.”

They are, however, no ordinary eyes. They’re as big as Bette Davis’s and about as expressive, and it’s safe to say that no one who has seen Mr. Nakadai as Hidetora will soon forget what they look like, huge with horror, as the mad lord descends the steps of his burning castle…

He’s never subtle, exactly. Those giant peepers do tend to bulge at the strangest times, as if they had a life of their own and there were nothing, really, he could do about them. His female co-star in “When a Woman Ascends the Stairs,” Hideko Takamine, used to tell him, “There’s no need to open your eyes so wide,” but even as a young, eager-to-learn actor he didn’t always heed that great veteran’s advice; try as he might, the orbs pop anyway. It’s a mannerism, but over the years it has become, as good actors’ tics sometimes do, a weirdly evocative and endearing one, like Jack Nicholson’s satyr grin. Without it he wouldn’t quite be himself.

And what it evokes most powerfully is an unalloyed, ungovernable joy in the creative act itself, a fierce performer’s delight that’s always welcome and always appropriate, even when the character he’s playing is an unhappy one. Whether Mr. Nakadai is portraying a man who is delighted by the life before his eyes or appalled by it, he never looks blasé, uninterested: he seems to exist in a state of constant surprise.