Japanese actor Ken Ogata has died at the age of 71. A veteran performer who made the leap to movies after achieving stardom in the 1965 TV drama Taikoko, Ogata was best known to Western filmgoers as a major collaborator of the great director Shohei Imamura. In 1979, Ogata gave a brave, powerful performance as a wandering sociopath in Imamura's Vengeance Is Mine, based on the true story of an actual serial killer. Almost thirty years and many serial-murderer movies later, Ogata's work in that film retains its special fascination as perfectly contained depiction of a suffering man who has no way to connect to the world except to lash out at it. Four years later, they re-teamed for The Ballad of Narayama, starring Ogata as a man required by village tradition to carry his aged mother up a mountainside and leave her there to die. The film won the Palm d'or at Cannes and Ogata received the Japanese Academy Award for his performance. He also appeared in Imamura's Eijanaika (1981) and Zegen (1987).
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