Yu Aoi

Her debut was as Shiori in Shunji Iwai's All About Lily Chou-Chou, and the film asked for something most first roles do not: stillness inside cruelty. Iwai used her again in Hana & Alice, where she played the Alice of the title, and that pairing set the terms for everything after. Directors have kept casting her as the person in the frame who is thinking hardest and saying least.

Two patterns in the credits are worth pointing at. The first is her willingness to go back. She returned to Alice eleven years later in the animated The Case of Hana & Alice, and she played the same Noriko Mamiya across Tokyo Family, What a Wonderful Family! and its sequel, which is an unusual kind of continuity for a Japanese film actress. The second is a voice career that would be a full career for anybody else: Shiro in Tekkonkinkreet, Sonoshee in Redline, Tanyu in Mushi-Shi, plus Children of the Sea, Penguin Highway, Miyori's Forest and Space Pirate Captain Harlock. She works constantly in animation and is very good at it, with a light, slightly hoarse delivery that sounds nothing like conventional anime performance.

The live-action range turned out much wider than the doll-like early roles suggested. She was Megumi Takani across four Rurouni Kenshin films, a hula student in Hula Girls, a wartime wife with a dangerous piece of knowledge in Wife of a Spy, and the difficult centre of Birds Without Names and Romance Doll. She is one of the few Japanese actresses of her generation equally at home in a blockbuster, an art film and a recording booth.