Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, who is known portraying the villainous sorcerer Shang Tsung in the 1995 movie of the video game Mortal Kombat, has died at the age of 75.
As per Deadline his family confirmed he died of complications of a stroke Thursday morning in Santa Barbara while surrounded by his children.
Tagawa’s big break in the movies came with Bernardo Bertolucci's 1987 epic The Last Emperor, playing a Chinese eunuch called Chang.
Further on in his career his credited works included the James Bond movie License to Kill, the drama Memoirs of a Geisha, the World War II action movie Pearl Harbor and the alternative history Amazon series The Man in the High Castle.
However, his best-remembered role was Shang Tsung in Mortal Kombat, a character he played not just on film but also for two TV shows and two video games.
Tagawa hailed from a showbiz family in Japan, as the son of an actress who performed in an all-female genre of musical revues called Takarazuka.
He once remarked that “my mother was an aristocrat from Tokyo who ran away to join the theatre, so acting is in my genes,” in an interview with the Guardian.
Tagawa was 35 by the time he landed his first movie role, an uncredited role in the 1986 John Carpenter comedy Big Trouble in Little China starring Kurt Russell.
Two years later he landed his breakthrough as a eunuch in The Last Emperor, the acclaimed historical drama about Puyi, the final monarch to rule China.
Tagawa landed his most famous role of Shang Tsung in Mortal Kombat by showing up to the audition in full costume and standing on a chair to read his sides.
The creative team were so impressed by his performance that they cast him at once, even making the character younger than in the video game so as not to require age prosthetics that would tamper with Tagawa's acting.
Mortal Kombat was a major box office success as a movie and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa became indelibly associated with Shang Tsung, a role he reappeared in for the 1997 sequel Mortal Kombat: Annihilation by way of archival footage.
