Nobuko Otowa
Nude

Born in Yonago, Tottori, Japan in 1924, Nobuko Otowa made over a hundred films between 1950 and her untimely death in 1994. Most of her best known roles came in the films of her husband Kaneto Shindo, who began a relationship with Otowa while he was still married to another woman after meeting the actress on the set of his film Story of a Beloved Wife (1951). She went on to appear in over two dozen more of the director’s films including Children of Hiroshima (1952), The Naked Island (1960), and most memorably his ghost films Onibaba (1964) and Kuroneko (1967), before eventually marrying him in 1977 after his wife finally granted him a divorce. Otowa was well known in Japan outside of Shindo’s films, however, having appeared in such films as Nagisa Oshima’s The Ceremony (1971), Hiroshi Inagaki’s The Three Treasures (1959), Kihachi Okamota’s Red Lion (1969) opposite Kurosawa regular Toshiro Mifune, and A Last Note (1995) for which she was posthumously awarded Best Actress at the 19th Japan Academy Prizes. As great as she was in nearly every film she made, her work in the haunting Onibaba is what really sticks with us here at Mr. Skin! Made when she was 39, the film features Otowa playing a much older woman and making her nude debut, baring her breasts multiple times playing a woman eking out a living by murdering samurais and selling their possessions! It’s a brilliant, beautiful, and haunting performance from an actress who was truly one of a kind! Thankfully her work allows her to live forever!