EntityQ211553· pop 54· linked from 366 articles

Ken Watanabe

Japanese actor

AI overview

Ken Watanabe is a Japanese actor known for his roles in major films and international productions. He matters because he has become one of the most recognizable Japanese performers in global cinema, helping to bring Japanese talent to wider audiences worldwide.

AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.

Person · Open Library

Born: 1959-10-21
Works: 4

Top works

Problem Cozumune Giris 101
Masamune Kun No Revenge
Người thông minh giải quyết vấn đề như thế nào?
Problem solving 101

via Open Library + Wikidata

Film & TV

Acting · Uonuma, Niigata, Japan

Ken Watanabe (born October 21, 1959) is a Japanese stage, film, and television actor. To English-speaking audiences he is known for playing tragic hero characters, such as General Tadamichi Kuribayashi in Letters from Iwo Jima and Lord Katsumoto Moritsugu in The Last Samurai, for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Among other awards, he has won the Japan…

Known for

Samurai Vengeance — Kinji Shinoda2026
Kyotojin no Hisokana Tanoshimi Rouge: Keisho — 東雲朔太郎2026
Kokuho — Hanjiro Hanai2025
The Final Piece — Shigeyoshi Toumyo2025
LA PANTHÈRE DE CARTIER2025
Unbound — Tamema Okitsugu2025
TRUE COLORS — Taichirou Tsujimura

Article

Ken Watanabe (渡辺謙, Watanabe Ken; born October 21, 1959) is a Japanese actor. He is best known for playing tragic hero characters, such as General Tadamichi Kuribayashi in Letters from Iwo Jima and Lord Katsumoto Moritsugu in The Last Samurai, for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Among other awards, Watanabe has won the Japan Academy Film Prize for Best Actor twice, in 2007 for Memories of Tomorrow and in 2010 for The Unbroken. He is also known for his roles in Christopher Nolan's films Batman Begins and Inception, as well as Memoirs of a Geisha, and Pokémon Detective Pikachu.

In 2014, he starred in the reboot Godzilla as Dr. Ishiro Serizawa, a role he reprised in the sequel, Godzilla: King of the Monsters. He lent his voice to the fourth and fifth installments of the Transformers franchise respectively, Transformers: Age of Extinction and Transformers: The Last Knight, as Decepticon-turned-Autobot Drift. In 2022, he starred in the HBO Max crime drama series Tokyo Vice.