Biography
Kazuko Shirakawa is a Japanese actress born on 30 September 1947 in Sasebo, Nagasaki. She began her career in independent pink films in the late 1960s before achieving prominence in Nikkatsu's Roman Porno series.
She starred in Nikkatsu's first Roman Porno film, Apartment Wife: Affair in the Afternoon (1971), and is regarded as the first of the studio's three 'Nikkatsu Queens' of the 1970s. After 1976 she moved into mainstream cinema, appearing in films by directors including Shohei Imamura and Hirokazu Kore-eda.
Notable later credits include Vengeance Is Mine (1979), Black Rain (1989), After Life (1999) as Nobuko Amano, The Devil's Path (2013), Radiance (2017) and House of Ninjas (2024).
