Biography
Kyōko Kagawa is a Japanese actress. Born on 5 December 1931 in Asō (now Namegata), Ibaraki Prefecture, she was discovered through a 1949 "New Face" contest run by the Tokyo Shimbun newspaper and made her film debut the following year.
She appeared in leading and supporting roles in films directed by Yasujirō Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, Akira Kurosawa and Mikio Naruse, including Tokyo Story (1953), Sansho the Bailiff (1954), The Bad Sleep Well (1960), High and Low (1963) and Red Beard (1965). After a three-year break following the birth of her child and a move to New York with her husband, she returned to Japan in the late 1960s and worked increasingly in television and on stage.
Kagawa received the Japan Academy Prize for Best Supporting Actress for Madadayo (1993), the Medal with Purple Ribbon in 1998 and the Order of the Rising Sun in 2004.
