Acting
Sep 20, 1949
Shimonoseki, Yamaguchi, Japan
Yūsaku Matsuda
Acting
Biography
Yūsaku Matsuda was a Japanese actor. He was born in Shimonoseki, to a Japanese father and a Zainichi Korean mother. He became an actor when he was 23 as a rookie police officer for the 1970s Japanese TV detective drama called Taiyō ni hoero! Apart from this role, his other defining role on television was in Tantei monogatari. He featured in many other TV shows and movies. He won the award for best actor at the 8th Hochi Film Award for Detective Story and The Family Game. He specialized in physical action movies. The 1989 movie Black Rain — directed by Ridley Scott and starring Michael Douglas and Andy Garcia— opened the door for Matsuda as an international actor. However, shortly after he made this movie, he died due to bladder cancer. He was survived by his second wife and three young children.
Feature Films (30)
Yūsaku Matsuda plays the part of a private detective in this modern day "who dunnit" mystery, full of suspense, thrills and chills.
Murder in the Doll House
Enigmatic teenager Akira Inugami is, by night, a powerful werewolf, who falls for a beautiful young teacher, and copes with a ruthless teen gang leader, whose yakuza father murdered Akira's parents years before.
Horror of the Wolf
A sendup of the stereotypical Japanese family: dad is a salaryman jerk, unable to relate to anyone; mom is a hopeless housewife; the older son is a moderate academic success; but the younger son is a rebellious goof-off for whom a tutor must be hired. The tutor proceeds to blow the entire family apart.
The Family Game
Set in the Taisho era, Hana no ran is a story about fashionable people without impulse control. Much of the action centers on a popular woman writer, the real-life poet Akiko Yosano, and her experiences among the literati of early 20th century Japan. Because of her independent, anti-war and often erotic poetry, she was a lightning rod for revolutionaries and other extremists, many of whom were destined to glamorous, yet ultimately pointless, deaths.
A Chaos of Flowers
The first movie of Tôru Murakawa’s “Game” trilogy, in which an assassin hired to recover a kidnap victim becomes embroiled in a vicious power struggle between two large corporations over a sizable government defence contract.
The Most Dangerous Game
Two New York cops get involved in a gang war between members of the Yakuza, the Japanese Mafia. They arrest one of their killers and are ordered to escort him back to Japan. However, in Japan he manages to escape, and as they try to track him down, they get deeper and deeper into the Japanese Mafia scene and they have to learn that they can only win by playing the game—the Japanese way.
Black Rain
A 1920s playwright meets a beautiful woman who may be the ghost of his patron's deceased wife.
Kagero-za
The third movie in Tōru Murakawa's Game trilogy about a hitman. Narumi is set up by a mysterious woman. Abducted and tortured, Narumi is forced to take on a difficult job. The target is a veteran killer as good as him.
The Execution Game
The second movie of Tôru Murakawa's "Game" trilogy. After making a sensational hit, a hitman has gone into hiding for five years. When he comes back he bumps into two women that he has spared five years ago. Two rival yakuza bosses hire Narumi to kill the other. Will Narumi's sense of chivalry entrap him again?
The Killing Game
Television & Series (10)
It is a hot and humid summer in Tokyo. Eiji (Yusaku Matsuda), armed with a modified gun, breaks into a salaryman's finance company in Shinjuku and makes off with nearly 40 million yen and Sachiko (Kaori Momoi), the receptionist. The two, a young man from the countryside with a perverse personality and an unattractive office worker, plan a fugitive journey without a guilty conscience with a large sum of money in their hands.
Nettaiya
A psychiatrist whose wife is murdered tracks down the culprit. Psychiatrist Masato Yuki returns to Japan after three years in the United States, where his beloved wife, Taeko, and daughter, Akiko, are waiting for him. However, Masato becomes suspicious of his wife's behavior. At Masato's homecoming party, he receives a mysterious phone call and his wife, Taeko, disappears. The next day, Taeko's gruesomely mutilated body is discovered in a motel. Masato tracks down the murderer. However, the secret of his daughter, Akiko's birth, is hidden in convoluted web of lies and agony.
Red Maze
After five years of service as a cop in San Francisco, Shunsaku Kudo becomes a private detective in Tokyo.
Detective Story
Daisaburo Kikuchi (Tomisaburo Wakayama), a skilled lawyer full of humanity, thrillingly depicts the process of stepping into the background of the case step by step.
