RIP Cary Hiroyuki Tagawa

It's sad but true. Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa may now be old, but I felt 75 felt "too soon" -- given that five more years and he'd be 80! I was looking at how the guy played as a more theatrically loud Shang Tsung in Mortal Kombat (1995) and paid homage to the character in Mortal Kombat 11. It was sasd that he was unavailable for Mortal Kombat (2011) to voice Shang Tsung at that time too! Unfortunately, his role as Heihachi Mishima was a real disappointment due to the director -- since I believe he was the TRUE SAVING GRACE of that badly-done Tekken film. 

Now, it's time to look at his contributions list to give him proper tribute:

Tagawa began working in the film industry in 1987 when he secured a role in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Oscar-winning movie The Last Emperor, and two years later, he had a prominent role in the classic James Bond film Licence to Kill.

His career continued to flourish with Rising Sun, before he landed the career-defining role of Shang Tsung in the 1995 video-game adaptation, Mortal Kombat, which he later reprised in a series of films and television series.

Another major role in his career came in 2015 when he starred in the highly successful Prime series, The Man in the High Castle. His final role was in the adult animation series, Blue Eye Samarai, which aired in 2023.

Reflecting on his childhood to The AV Club in 2015, Tagawa said, “I’ve had a slightly different experience than most Asian and Asian-American actors in Hollywood. I was born in Tokyo, left when I was 5, and was raised in the U.S. on a U.S. Army post during the 1950s and 1960s, at a time when it wasn’t real popular to be Japanese—because of the war, of course—and really had to sort of roll my own reality and make some decisions at a very young age about how I wanted to proceed in what was a… complicated experiment.”

He also said of working on The Last Emperor, “It was mind boggling. You know, to suddenly be working with one of the top-10 directors in the world, plus the film was in China, I almost blurted out, ‘How much do I have to pay?’ It was just like a dream come true. That was an amazing experience.”

RIP Tagawa you will be sorely missed!