Kuniko Miyake

Kuniko Miyake is one of those actresses who makes you realize how much presence can live in absolute stillness. Born in 1916, early in the Taisho era, and a fixture of Yasujirō Ozu's films, she came up in Japanese film when the craft demanded a kind of internal gravity that you either had or you didn't, and she clearly had it in abundance. The black-and-white era of Japanese cinema required actors to do enormous emotional work with very little noise, and I'd bet she was the kind of performer who could shift the whole temperature of a scene just by walking into it. She passed in 1992, which means she lived long enough to see the industry transform around her several times over. Gone, but still alive somewhere on celluloid — that's not a bad legacy at all.

This take was written by generative AI, one per person, from publicly reported facts (editorial policy). It is a reading of the record, not reporting.

Kuniko Miyake was a Japanese actress born on September 17, 1916, in Iwatsuki, Saitama Prefecture. She debuted with Shochiku in 1934, returned to the screen in 1948 after a break for marriage, and appeared in many of Yasujirō Ozu's films before moving mainly into television. She passed away on November 4, 1992.

Name (English)

Kuniko Miyake

Name (Japanese)

三宅邦子

Reading

みやけ くにこ

Born

September 17, 1916 – November 4, 1992

Origin

Iwatsuki, Saitama Prefecture, Japan

Occupation

Actress

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Virgo / Dragon

Active years

1934 - 1942、1948 - 1990s

Works summary

Appearances

69 (1950–1992)

By year (titles with a known year)

1950: 2, 1951: 1, 1952: 3, 1953: 1, 1954: 1, 1955: 1, 1956: 1, 1957: 2, 1959: 2, 1960: 2, 1961: 1, 1962: 2, 1963: 3, 1965: 1, 1966: 1, 1967: 3, 1968: 1, 1969: 4, 1972: 1, 1974: 2, 1977: 1, 1979: 1, 1980: 2, 1981: 4, 1983: 2, 1985: 2, 1986: 2, 1988: 2, 1990: 1, 1992: 1, year unknown: 16

Filmography / notable works

• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%B8%89%E5%AE%85%E9%82%A6%E5%AD%90
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q11355110

Tags

• From Saitama Prefecture
• Actress

Last updated

October 18, 2026

Only publicly available facts are listed; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. Base data was compiled from Wikidata from June 2026 onward; ages are recalculated daily and deaths are checked against Wikidata on an ongoing basis. Works and profile fields sourced from Wikipedia reflect content as of 2026-08-26. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.