Haruo Nakajima obit

Haruo Nakajima, the First Actor to Play Godzilla, Dies at 88

He was not on the list.

Haruo Nakajima, the Japanese actor who played the movie monster Godzilla in a dozen films and whose booming steps in a 200-pound rubber suit sent the denizens of Tokyo running into cinematic history, died on Monday. He was 88.

His daughter, Sonoe Nakajima, said the cause was pneumonia. She did not say where he died.

Mr. Nakajima was a 25-year-old stunt actor with just four movies to his credit when he was cast in what are perhaps Japan’s two most famous films of that era, both released in 1954: Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece “Seven Samurai,” in which he had a bit part, and “Godzilla.”

In “Godzilla” he played the title character: a gigantic, irradiated lizard whose mutated form and destructive power wreak havoc on Tokyo. The first movie in a long-running franchise, it was released nine years after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a not-so-thinly veiled fable about the dangers of nuclear weapons.

 “One might remotely regard him as a symbol of Japanese hate for the destruction that came out of nowhere and descended upon Hiroshima one pleasant August morn,” Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote of the monster in a 1956 review of “Godzilla: King of the Monsters,” the English-dubbed version of the film released in North America. “But we assure you that the quality of the picture and the childishness of the whole idea do not indicate such a calculation. Godzilla was simply meant to scare people.”

Mr. Nakajima would eventually put on the heavy rubber monster costume 12 times from 1954 to 1972 in a series of movies that became an international phenomenon.

The success of Godzilla kicked off Japan’s golden age of tokusatsu, or “special filming” movies, in which rubber-costumed actors portraying colossal, terrifying creatures typically destroyed scale-model sets, creating illusions of reality that would one day be generated even more spectacularly by computers.

 “We had to improvise, and make it all look real on screen,” Mr. Nakajima told The Times in 2013.

He recalled Godzilla’s creator, Eiji Tsuburaya, struggling amid Japan’s postwar shortages and rationing to find enough rubber and latex to construct the costume.

“You don’t learn this from a textbook but by doing,” Mr. Nakajima said of those early days. “There is no chance to learn now.”

Photo

Godzilla destroys a train in a scene from the film. Credit Toho Co. Ltd.

Wearing a hot, heavy suit beneath the soundstage’s bright lights had him sweating so much, he said, that at the end of a day’s shooting he could wring enough perspiration from his undershirt to fill half a bucket.

To perfect the monster’s destructive gait, Mr. Nakajima spent hours at the zoo studying how elephants and bears walked. He wanted the monster to be believable, he said in interviews.

Mr. Nakajima was born on Jan. 1, 1929, in Yamagata, Japan. He was 16 when Japan surrendered to the Allies, ending World War II. His first credited acting role was in “Sword for Hire,” in 1952, when he was 23.

As a contract actor for the Japanese studio Toho, Mr. Nakajima starred in dozens of other monster movies, including “King Kong Returns,” a 1967 Japanese production in which he again played the title character, this time in an ape costume.

He retired from acting in 1973. Beginning in the 1990s, he made frequent appearances at conventions of comic-book and movie fans. He lived in a suburb of Tokyo. There was no immediate information on survivors, besides his daughter.

Mr. Nakajima was the first iteration of Godzilla but not the last. Toho produced 27 more Godzilla films after Mr. Nakajima hung up his rubber suit in 1972. Since then, Hollywood has produced three “Godzilla” movies. The next will star Ken Watanabe and is scheduled for release in 2019.