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The Japanese Koji Yakusho was crowned best actor at Cannes on Saturday for “Perfect Days” by the German Wim Wenders, a touching story about a toilet cleaner in Tokyo.
“I want to specifically thank Wim Wenders…who has really created a wonderful character,” he said upon accepting the award.
Yakusho, 67, appears in most scenes of “Perfect Days” as a mysterious, bookish man with no friends, content to spend his free time reading, watering his plants, taking photos and listening to songs on his car stereo.
The versatile actor’s roles in more than four decades of filmmaking range from warlords and gangsters to killers and cops – and now an ordinary man who keeps Tokyo’s public restrooms pristine.
He also moved to Hollywood for “Memoirs of a Geisha” in 2005 and “Babel” a year later.
“Wim had given me very little information…There was a lot of mystery. Even today, he’s a character I know almost nothing about,” he said of his role. , which involved almost no dialogue.
“It was the first time I had shot like that, in a very short period, without rehearsals,” he said of his collaboration with one of the giants of European cinema.
German Wenders, 77, won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1984 for “Paris, Texas”.
Born in 1956 in Isahaya, Nagasaki Prefecture, Yakusho first worked as a town hall employee before turning to acting in 1979, after following a newspaper ad.
Out of 800 applicants, he was one of four selected, “and today I’m the only one to be an actor”, he told French media in 2003.
Her first big role that helped propel her career was in the popular hit “Tampopo” (1985) about finding a noodle soup recipe.
Since then, notable films include 1997’s Palme-winning ‘The Eel’ and 2017’s ‘The Third Murder’.
In 2009, he made his first and only feature film “Toad’s Oil” in which he also played the main role.
When asked what keeps him going in the business, he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2019, “I still think I’m not quite right, but in the next movie, I’m finally going to be successful.
“I guess it was the drug of this business for me, which kept me going for 40 years.”
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