Nachi Nozawa

For a Japanese audience of a certain age, Nachi Nozawa was the sound of American and European stardom. Born in Tokyo as Yasutomo Nozawa, he was the official dub-over voice of both Al Pacino and Alain Delon, a strange pair of registers to own at once, and he also dubbed Robert Redford, Bruce Willis, Dustin Hoffman, Christopher Walken, Willem Dafoe, James Woods, Giuliano Gemma, David McCallum and Don Johnson. If a certain kind of film reached Japanese television, it very likely reached it in his voice.

The animation work is just as central. He was Cobra, the space pirate, in the 1982 series, and returned to the character in Cobra The Animation more than twenty five years later. He was Hyakkimaru in the 1969 Dororo, Sanzo in Goku's Adventure, Count Fersen in The Rose of Versailles, Masumi Hayami in Glass Mask, Jin Munakata in Aim for the Ace!, Black Jack in both Marine Express and Bremen 4, and, in the 1969 Lupin the Third pilot film, the very first screen Lupin. Later generations found him as the priest Anderson in Hellsing and as Franz Bonaparta in Monster.

The through line is a voice that sounds amused and dangerous in the same breath, which is why he kept being cast as men who are either the coolest or the most frightening person in the room. He worked to the end of his life, including Yona Yona Penguin in 2009, and died in 2010; archive recordings surfaced afterwards, as with the Vexen material used in Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days.