OKADA Mariko - Actress who lived between reason and emotion (1950s-1970s)

OKADA Mariko - Actress who lived between reason and emotion (1950s-1970s)

Mariko Okada (born in 1933) is a great actress who continued the tradition of Shochiku's women's films. She was raised as the adopted daughter of Tokihiko Okada, a famous actor of the silent era. With Junichiro Tanizaki as her godfather, she made her leading role debut in the Toho film "Maihime. She attracted attention at a young age, and showed early qualities as an actress when she played a woman who falls in love with a man in "Asunaro Monogatari". Her father's mysterious good looks tended to be consumed as screen color, but after moving to Shochiku, she showed her true potential.

While she expanded her range of acting, such as the comical flavor she showed in "Money-Collecting Trip" and the cute, dry, urban daughter in "Banana," her real strength was still in melodramas. In films such as "A Certain Falling Day," "Onna Mai" and "Spotted Woman," she played women living in adultery and forbidden love, attracting audiences with the depth and complexity of their psychology. These films were also expressions of women's independence and desires at a time when postwar morality was beginning to waver.

Many of the films she made with her husband, director Yoshishige Yoshida, also dealt with themes of adultery and broken love. Amid the trend in Japanese cinema of the 1960s toward internal realism, Mariko Okada shined as an embodiment of the "fusion of intelligence and emotion. Her existence symbolizes the process by which the postwar image of women changed from "good wife and wise mother" to "subject of life.