An Actor's Revenge

An intricate tale of betrayal and retribution set in the cloistered world of nineteenth-century kabuki theatre

An Actor's Revenge is a remake of the 1935 film which also starred Kazuo Hasegawa. The 1963 remake was Hasegawa's 300th role as a film actor.

A trio of corrupt men are responsible for driving seven-year-old Yukitarō’s mother and father to insanity and suicide. Yukitarō is adopted and brought up by the actor-manager of an Osaka kabuki troupe.

The adult Yukitarō becomes an onnagata, or female impersonator, taking the stage name Yukinojō. Like many of the great onnagata, particularly of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, he wears women’s clothes and uses the language and mannerisms of a woman offstage as well as on. Twenty years later, in the mid 1830s, he attempts to avenge the deaths of his parents.

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