Actress

Actress

Born: February 12, 1920; Died: September 7, 2014.

Shirley Yamaguchi, who has died aged 94, starred in films by such distinguished directors as Akira Kurosawa and Sam Fuller, but her movies seem a little mundane compared with her colourful and dramatic life.

She was born in China and narrowly escaped execution for treason at the end of the Second World War, during which she appeared in Japanese propaganda films under the name Li Xianglan.

She played a Chinese orphan taken in by a Japanese naval officer in a film called China Nights in 1940. Ungrateful and resentful at first, she comes to her senses when he gives her a slap and falls in love with him. It was all very symbolic.

With her life on the line after the war, a friend managed to produce her birth certificate, proving that although she was born in China, she was actually a Japanese national and her real name was Yamaguchi.

That was just the beginning of her story. She subsequently pursued a successful career in Japan, America and Hong Kong, as both an actress and singer - her version of Danny Boy in Japanese is on YouTube.

She then pursued a career as a television presenter, covering the Vietnam War for Japanese television, and she wound up as a member of the Japanese parliament. Her life has inspired several TV programmes and a novel.

She was born Yoshiko Yamaguchi in 1920 to Japanese parents in the Manchuria region of China. The Japanese had various rights and claims in the area and her father worked for a Japanese-run railway company. The Japanese invaded in 1931 and set up a puppet state called Manchuko.

It was against this background that Yamaguchi began her film career. She was presented to the public as Chinese - "the Chinese woman that the Japanese men desire most". She later expressed regret for having made China Nights, blaming her involvement on her youth.

After being deported from China, she continued her career in Japan as Yoshiko Yamaguchi and played a singer libelled by the press in Akira Kurosawa's Scandal (1950).

She moved to America and reached a wider western audience when she starred in King Vidor's Japanese War Bride (1952), and Sam Fuller's cult film noir House Of Bamboo (1955).

She also enjoyed a brief American television career and appeared in the short-lived Broadway musical Shangri-La (1956).

In 1951 she had married the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi, but the union ended in divorce a few years later. She moved to Hong Kong and appeared in several Chinese-language films there, including the Shaw Brothers' Madame White Snake (1956), playing an ancient snake spirit which has taken human form.

In the late 1950s Yamaguchi married the diplomat Hiroshi Otaka and retired from films. Styling herself Yoshiko Otaka, she developed a new career in television and then went into politics.

She was a Liberal Democratic member of parliament for 18 years and promoted links between Japan and other Asian countries, including China, to which she would eventually return many years after the war.