Yoko Tani

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Yoko Tani (谷洋子)
Born Itani Yōko (猪谷洋子)
2 August 1928(1928-08-02)
Paris
Died 19 April 1999(1999-04-19) (aged 70)
Paris
Occupation Actress, Entertainer

Yoko Tani (谷洋子 Tani Yōko?, * 2 August 1928, Paris[1][2][3] –- † 19 April 1999, Paris[4][5]) was a French-born Japanese actress and nightclub entertainer.

Contents

[edit] Early life

Her birth name was Itani Yōko (猪谷洋子).[6][7] She has occasionally been described as 'Eurasian', 'half-French', 'half-Japanese',[8] and even 'Italian-Japanese',[9] all of which are incorrect.

According to contemporary French sources,[10] her father and mother -- both Japanese -- were attached to the Japanese embassy in Paris, and Tani herself was conceived en route during a shipboard passage from Japan to Europe in 1927, hence given the name Yōko (洋子), one reading of which can mean "ocean-child."[11]

But according to Japanese sources,[12] the family returned to Japan soon after, in 1930, when Yoko would still have been a toddler, and she did not return to France until 1950, when her schooling was completed. Given that there were severe restrictions on Japanese travelling outside Japan directly after WWII, this would have been an unusual event; however, it is known that Itani had attended an elite Catholic girls' school in Tokyo (unnamed, but probably Seishin, which the Japanese Empress Michiko also attended), and through it secured a Catholic scholarship to study at the University of Paris.[13]

[edit] Career

[edit] Return to France (1950–1955)

There was no question that she was bright, but there was equally no question that, once in Paris, she had much interest in attending university. Installing herself in Montmartre, she developed an immediate attraction to the cabaret, the nightclub, and the variety music-hall, where --- setting herself up as an exotic oriental beauty --- she quickly established a reputation for her provocatively sexy "geisha" dances, which generally ended with her slipping out of her kimono. It was here she was spotted by Marcel Carné, who took her into his circle of director and actor-friends, including Roland Lesaffre, whom she was later to marry.[14] As a result, she began to get bit parts in films—starting as (predictably) a Japanese dancer, in Gréville's Le port du désir (1953–1954, released 1955)—and on the stage, with a role as Lotus Bleu in la Petite Maison de Thé (French adaptation of The Teahouse of the August Moon) at the Théâtre Montparnasse, 1954-1955 season.[15]

See link: as a general example of her (for lack of a better word) schtick -- this amusing video is interesting also in that it latterly contains the young Yoko's recorded voice, showing her as being far from a native speaker.

[edit] Lesaffre and Japan (1956)

It should be noted that Tani's involvement with cinema was, up to the mid 1950s, limited entirely to that of portraying stereotyped orientals in French films. With the end of the US occupation of Japan in 1952, however, postwar Japanese cinema itself burst upon the French scene, culminating in the years 1955 and 1956 when a total of six Japanese films, including Kurosawa's Ikimono no Kiroku (生きものの記録) and Mizoguchi's Chikamatsu Monogatari (近松物語), were entered at Cannes. And it was at Cannes that Tani made contact with the likes of directors Hisamatsu Seiji and Kurosawa, contacts which led to a trip to Japan in 1956 by Tani and Lesaffre, and their joint appearance in the Toho production Fukuaki no seishun (裸足の青春 fr. La jeunesse aux pieds nus). It was originally intended that the film be directed by Kurosawa himself, but in the end it fell to his Toho stable-mate Taniguchi Senkichi.[16] Tani and Lesaffre's ambition was to bring the film back to France and release it in the French market, an aim which was never achieved.

During the same trip, and also for Toho, Tani took a small role in Hisamatsu's Jōshû to tomo ni (女囚と共に), a variant on the dubious but ever-popular "women in prison" theme, in which she played a westernised Japanese Catholic named Mary. This film, now virtually unobtainable, was notable only in that it also starred two veritable legends of Japanese cinema: Hara Setsuko and Tanaka Kinuyo. (Despite this, it's not clear how much contact, if any, she would have had with them --- apart from the relative novelty of having a French husband in tow, Tani would have been an absolute 'nobody' compared with these great Japanese stars).

[edit] International Period (1958–1962)

Early in 1957 she appeared in a small role in her first English-language film: the MGM production of Graham Greene's The Quiet American, a political drama set in French Indochina. Despite being an American production, the film was shot entirely in Rome (with location scenes of Saigon added), with Tani cast as a francophone Vietnamese nightclub hostess.

But Tani's real "break" in English-language cinema came with the 1958 production The Wind Cannot Read. This film, a war-time love story, had originally been a project of the British producer Alexander Korda, and was to have been directed by David Lean, who in 1955 travelled to Japan with author Richard Mason and cast Japanese actress Kishi Keiko as the female lead. Locations were scouted in India, and Ms Kishi (then 22 years old) was brought to England to learn sufficient English for the part. At a very advanced stage, the project fell apart, and a few months later Korda died. The pieces were eventually picked up by the Rank Organization, and it was decided to produce the film using the script and locations already set out by Lean, with one of Rank's big stars, Dirk Bogarde, in the male lead, Ralph Thomas to direct, and Tani, who was found in Paris, to play the leading female role. The film was a modest commercial success, and lead to further roles in other British co-productions --- as the Inuit Asiak in the Anglo-French-Italian The Savage Innocents (1959), and as the ingénue Seraphina in Piccadilly Third Stop (1960).[17]

Aside from The Quiet American, her only other "Hollywood" roles were in My Geisha (1962 - shot, however, on location in Japan) and the fatuous Dean Martin comedy Who's Been Sleeping in My Bed? (1963, shot at Paramount Studios in Los Angeles).

Despite being type-cast as an exotic, Tani got to play some unusual roles as a result, as evidenced by her portrayal of Japanese doctor/scientist Sumiko Ogimura in the self-consciously internationalist 1959 East-German DEFA / Polish film production of Stanisław Lem's novel The Astronauts, Der schweigende Stern. Perhaps even more unusual (for the time) was her trip to the Vancouver Islands in Canada in 1962 to play the role of Mary Ota in James Clavell's The Sweet and the Bitter, which treated the aftermath of the wartime internment of Canadian Japanese and the loss of their properties and their businesses.

[edit] Spies, Swords and Sandals (1963 - )

1962/63 marked a shift in Tani's career: a return (once again) to France and the definitive end to her marriage to Lesaffre. From this point on she was to be more strictly European-based and to take on work mainly in the low-budget Italian peplum cinema and in femme fatale roles in UK television dramas such as Danger Man and Man in a Suitcase.


Despite her involvement with film, Tani never abandoned her attachment to the nightclub and cabaret. The British producer Betty Evelyn Box, when looking for the female lead for The Wind Cannot Read (vide supra), wrote:

As Richard [Mason] suggested, it had been extremely difficult to cast the Japanese girl -- we spent months on that, and nearly gave up. We eventually found Yoko Tani in, of all places, a girlie club -- more or less a striptease joint -- in Paris, and we were delighted with Richard's reaction to her.[18]

And, from a 1960's account of the well-known Le Crazy Horse de Paris nightclub:

[Le] Crazy Horse Saloon is a training ground for stars. From first to last the strippers all have names which are likely to crop up in the movies or Parisian social life: Yoko Tani, Rita Renoir, Rita Cadillac, Dodo d'Hambourg, Bertha von Paraboum, etc.[19]

Even as late as 1977, we find her in São Paulo, where she had a small role in Chinese-Brazilian director Juan Bajon's sexploitation film O Estripador de Mulheres :

Yet images of Japanese-Brazilian sensuality, both explicit and potential, were not confined to film: in 1977, Yoko Tani starred in a transvestite show in downtown São Paulo...[20]

[edit] Personal life

Her 1956 marriage to Lesaffre (who maintained an ongoing, probably homosexual, liaison with Carné[21]) was childless, and ended in divorce in 1962.[22] Lesaffre claimed in his autobiography Mataf (éditions Pygmalion, 1991), that theirs was the first Franco-Japanese marriage after WWII[23] --- conceivably true, but almost impossible to verify. (True or not, it may have begun something of a trend, since Kishi Keiko and Yves Ciampi were married the following year.)

She died in Paris, after a long illness, but is buried in the remote seaside village of Binic, in Brittany. Her tomb carries the Breton inscription «Ganeoc'h Bepred».[24] Notably, her late husband, Lesaffre, is buried together with Marcel Carné in his grave in the Cimetière Saint-Vincent in Montmartre.[25]

[edit] Film

[edit] Television

  • 1960 (UK) : Chasing the Dragon - BBC television (scriptwriter Colin Morris)
  • 1961 (UK) : Rashomon - BBC television adaptation - The Wife
  • 1962 (USA) : Ben Casey - episode "A Pleasant Thing for the Eyes" - Aiko Tanaka
  • 1963 (UK) : Edgar Wallace Mysteries - episode 31, "The Partner" (based on A Million Dollar Story (1926)) dir. Gerard Glaister[26] - Lin Siyan
  • 1964 (UK) : Drama - episode "Miss Hanago" - Miss Hanago
  • 1966 (UK) : Armchair Theatre - Associated British Corp. - episode "The Tilted Screen" - Michiko
  • 1967 (UK) : Danger Man - ITV; season 4, episode 1, "Koroshi" - Ako Nakamura
  • 1967 (UK) : Danger Man - ITV; season 4, episode 2, "Shinda Shima" - Miho
  • 1967 (UK) : Man in a Suitcase - ITV; episode 5, "Variation on a Million Bucks pt. 1" - Taiko
  • 1967 (UK) : Man in a Suitcase - ITV; episode 6, "Variation on a Million Bucks pt. 2" - Taiko
  • 1968 (France/Canada) : Les Dossiers de l'agence O - episode 10, "L'arrestation du musicien" - La stripteaseuse
  • 1971 (USA/UK) : Shirley's World - episode 3, "The Defective Defector" - Okiyo
  • 1972 (France/Québéc) : Le fils du ciel - Gisèle
  • 1986 (France) : Série rose (erotic anthology) - episode "Le lotus d'or" - Madame Lune

[edit] Theatre

[edit] References

  1. ^ http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoko_Tani
  2. ^ http://kotobank.jp/word/%E8%B0%B7%E6%B4%8B%E5%AD%90
  3. ^ http://www.yunioshi.com/japaneseinmovies2.html
  4. ^ http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoko_Tani
  5. ^ http://kotobank.jp/word/%E8%B0%B7%E6%B4%8B%E5%AD%90
  6. ^ http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoko_Tani
  7. ^ http://kotobank.jp/word/%E8%B0%B7%E6%B4%8B%E5%AD%90
  8. ^ Film fatales: Women in espionage films and television, 1962-1973 Tom Lisanti, Louis Paul p 282
  9. ^ http://books.google.com/books?id=cQUPAQAAIAAJ&q=%22yoko+tani%22&dq=%22yoko+tani%22&lr=&cd=50
  10. ^ http://lh3.ggpht.com/_Enhom_u6Rl8/SXCF4dYJSjI/AAAAAAAABmQ/A0GU13qq0vM/YOKOTANI02.jpg (1958)
  11. ^ ibid
  12. ^ http://www.eiganokuni.com/hosokawa/01.html
  13. ^ http://www.yunioshi.com/japaneseinmovies2.html
  14. ^ http://www.marcel-carne.com/la-bande-a-carne/roland-lesaffre/reperes-biographiques-filmographie-decorations/
  15. ^ http://www.regietheatrale.com/index/index/affiches_theatre/resultat.php?recordID=652&titre=LA%20PETITE%20MAISON%20DE%20THE
  16. ^ http://www.marcel-carne.com/la-bande-a-carne/roland-lesaffre/photographies-de-roland-lesaffre/
  17. ^ David Lean: A Biography Kevin Brownlow Faber&Faber, London 1996 pp 331-341
  18. ^ Lifting the Lid: the Autobiography of Film Producer Betty Box, OBE Betty Evelyn Box, University of Michigan Press, 2000
  19. ^ A Parisian's guide to Paris Henri Gault, Christian Millau Random House, 1969
  20. ^ A Discontented Diaspora: Japanese Brazilians and the Meanings of Ethnic Militancy 1960-1980 Jeffrey Lesser, Duke University Press 2007
  21. ^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Carn%C3%A9
  22. ^ http://www.marcel-carne.com/la-bande-a-carne/roland-lesaffre/reperes-biographiques-filmographie-decorations/
  23. ^ http://www.marcel-carne.com/la-bande-a-carne/roland-lesaffre/1991-lautobiographie-de-roland-lesaffre-mataf/
  24. ^ http://www.landrucimetieres.fr/spip/spip.php?article1808
  25. ^ http://www.flickr.com/photos/austinevan/4612574695/
  26. ^ http://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=1032
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