Noriko Honma
Noriko Honma is an actor, born 1911.
Akira Kurosawa kept casting her, and almost never in a part with a name. Noriko Honma, born in Hokkaido in 1911, appears in Stray Dog, Ikiru, Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, Red Beard, Dreams, Rhapsody in August and Madadayo, which spans his career nearly end to end, and her credits in them read: Wooden Tub Shop woman, Housewife, Woman Farmer, Farmer's Ex-wife, Resident, Mourner, Old Lady Holding a Cat.
The exception is the one everybody has seen. In Rashomon she plays the medium, called on to speak for a man who cannot speak for himself, and the sequence is pure physical acting: the voice changes, the body locks, and a scene of formal testimony tips into something close to horror. It is brief and it is the most famous thing in her filmography by a distance.
Her working life was busiest in the 1950s, when she moved constantly between prestige productions and everything else. There are domestic dramas, Wife, A Wife's Heart, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, and there are monster pictures, Varan and Ebirah, Horror of the Deep, taken presumably for the same reason working actors take anything. She was in her seventies and eighties when Kurosawa called her back for the late films, still cast as a woman in a crowd, still worth watching in it. She died in April 2009 at the age of 97.
Movies (29)
- Seven Samurai (1954)
- Ikiru (1952)
- Rashomon (1950)
- Yojimbo (1961)
- Dreams (1990)
- Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (1966)
- Red Beard (1965)
- Stray Dog (1949)
- Madadayo (1993)
- Samurai III: Duel at Ganryu Island (1956)
- When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960)
- I Live in Fear (1955)
- Rhapsody in August (1991)
- Untamed Woman (1957)
- Varan (1958)
- A Wife's Heart (1956)
- All About Marriage (1958)
- A Rainbow Plays in My Heart: Part 2 (1957)
- Summer Clouds (1958)
- Brother and Sister (1953)
- Snow-Flake (1950)
- Oh, Bomb! (1964)
- Varan the Unbelievable (1962)
- Their Father's Wife (1953)
- The Lone Journey (1955)
- Wife (1953)
- Marital Relations (1955)
- Ditch (1954)
- Last of the Wild Ones (1954)
Where to start with Noriko Honma
Rashomon first, and not only because it is the great film. Her scene as the medium is the reason her name survives at all, and it lands hardest if nobody has described it to you in advance.
From there, Seven Samurai and Ikiru are the two Kurosawa masterworks she sits inside, though you will have to look for her. The pleasure is in noticing how much texture the films draw from faces like hers. Stray Dog is where the collaboration began, and Yojimbo finds room for her in the middle of Kurosawa's driest comedy.
For the other half of the career, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs is the best film she made away from him, a hard adult drama about a Ginza bar hostess, and Ebirah, Horror of the Deep is the working actor's other reality: a monster picture, a small part, a pay cheque.