Japanese actress Machiko Kyō

In the 1950s, Machiko Kyō was as ubiquitous in Japaense cinema as Sophia Loren was in Italian movies.

She gained international fame as the wife of a man killed in a fight in 1951's Rashomon, the Akira Kurosawa classic in which three people remember the killing in three different ways.

Ms. Kyō went on to star in other legendary Japanese movies,.such as the 1958 drama Sorrow Is Only For Women and Kon Ichikawa's Odd Obsession, a 1959 drama about a man who suspects that his wife is having an affair with their daughter's fiancé, and Yasujirō Ozu's Floating Weeds (1959). She did only one Hollywood movie - 1956's The Teahouse of the August Moon,  as a geisha girl named Lotus Blossom. The Teahouse of the August Moon is a comedy about the American occupation of Okinawa after World War II.  Her American co-stars included Marlon Brando, Glenn Ford, Eddie Albert, and Harry Morgan.

At 94 years of age at this writing, Machiko Kyō was active as an actress into her eighties. She now lives in her hometown of Osaka.