Yūsaku Matsuda (松田 優作, Matsuda Yūsaku, September 21, 1949 – November 6, 1989) was a Japanese actor. In Japan he was best known for roles in action films and a variety of television series in the 1970s as well as a switch to a wider range of roles in the 1980s. His final film appearance was as the villain Sato in Ridley Scott's Black Rain.

He is considered one of Japan's most important film actors.

Biography

Matsuda was born out of wedlock in Shimonoseki, to a Japanese father, a probation officer, whom he never met, and a Zainichi Korean mother, Kaneko Matsuda, originally Kim. She was a Korean who had married a Japanese man who died during World War II. After his death, Kaneko became a prostitute to support Yūsaku's half-brothers. Kaneko deliberately wrongly recorded his birth year as 1950 on his birth records.

He grew up and was educated in Shimonoseki, attending Kanda elementary school and Bunyo Junior High School, before entering Shimonoseki Secondary School. In 1967, while at high school, at the urging of his mother, he stayed with his aunt in the city of Seaside in America for one year. He attended Seaside High School. However, extremely unhappy in America, malnourished, unable to speak English, and feeling himself the victim of discrimination, he returned to Japan. Because he was afraid of facing his mother, he went to stay with his older brother in Tokyo. He attended Hōnan High School (豊南高等学校) as a night student and graduated in 1969. After graduating, he entered a theatre company called "Rokugatsu Gekijō" (六月劇場), leaving in November 1969. In 1971 he joined a theatre group "Club Marui", then in 1972 he joined "Bungakuza". He met his future wife Michiko through Club Marui in May 1971. At the time he was working as a barman.

He changed his citizenship from Korean to Japanese while he was starring in Taiyō ni Hoero!, with the help of Michiko, whose father was a member of the Liberal Democratic party who was head of the then-Prime Minister's support office.

In 1975 he was involved in two fracas, first with two journalists, and then with a student who attacked him with a wooden kendo sword because the student thought he was assaulting a woman. The student ended up in a hospital, and Matsuda received a suspended sentence for assault. This caused a major disruption in his career, with film studios and television companies dropping him.

He married Michiko Kumamoto in 1975 and had one daughter. They divorced in 1981 after six years of marriage. In 1983, he married Miyuki Kumagai, whom he had started a relationship with in 1979, when she was 17, when she appeared in the television series Tantei Monogatari. They had three children. Two of the children, Ryuhei and Shota, became actors and daughter Yuki become singer.

In 1988, Matsuda was diagnosed with bladder cancer, before shooting began for Black Rain. Matsuda refused chemotherapy, as he thought it would affect his ability to act in the film. After his death, his first wife, who had experienced him ignoring an ear infection until it required surgery to prevent deafness, wrote that she suspected that he did not actually realize the seriousness of his illness. During the filming, he was urinating blood. By the time shooting finished, in March 1989, his cancer had spread to his spine and lungs, making it inoperable. On October 7, 1989, Matsuda was hospitalized. A month after he was admitted, Matsuda died at 6:45 PM JST on November 6 at the age of 40, at a Tokyo hospital. He was buried in Nishitama cemetery (西多摩霊園) in Akiruno, Tokyo.

The character Aokiji in the manga One Piece is based on Matsuda.

Best films