Mortal Kombat actor, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa dies at 75

Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa has died at the age of 75. 

His publicist Penny Vizcarra has confirmed he died on Thursday, Dec. 4, in Santa Barbara, California due to complications from a stroke. 

According to Deadline, he was surrounded by his children. 
 

The prolific actor had a career spanning almost 40 years with over 150 roles, including Mortal Kombat, James Bond movie Licence To Kill, The Man In The High Castle and many more. 

Tagawa is best known by fans for his role as evil sorcerer Shang Tsung, which he first played in the original 1995 Mortal Kombat movie. 

He went onto to play the character in TV series Mortal Kombat: Legacy 2013, and Mortal Kombat X: Generation two years later. 

In 2019, he voiced the sorcerer in video game Mortal Kombat 11, while his physical likeness was used in 2023’s Mortal Kombat: Onslaught. 

He once said of his original appearance in the franchise that it was “perfect timing”, adding: “Mortal Kombat as a video game, at the time we did the film, was on number four or five and that the impact of the film certainly had to do with the build of the video games.” 

Tagawa’s breakout role was as driver Chang in 1987’s The Last Emperor, while two years later he joined the James Bond franchise in Licence To Kill, Timothy Dalton’s second and final 007 outing. 

He played Kwang, an undercover agent of the Hong Kong Narcotics Board, while he would also share the screen with another Bond actor, Sean Connery, in 1993 thriller Rising Sun. 

Other standout roles included appearances in Memoirs of a Geisha, Pearl Harbour, and Amazon series The Man in the High Castle. 

He appeared in the latter from 2015 to 2018 as a Japanese official, Nobusuke Tagomi, whose loyalties were unclear.

Over the years, he also made guest appearances in shows like Baywatch, Miami Vice and MacGyver, while his last TV credit coming in 2023 animated series Blue Eye Samurai. 

His Japanese-American father served in the US Army, while his mother performed in a type of all-female musical revues known as Takarazuka. 

He once told The Guardian: “My mother was an aristocrat from Tokyo who ran away to join the theatre, so acting is in my genes.”

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