Kuriko Namino

Kuriko Namino, born in Kamakura in 1945, has spent her career carrying Shinpa theatre, a form that sits in the shadow of kabuki's glamour and deals instead in domestic melodrama and quiet emotional damage. She was born into a great acting family; her brother was the eighteenth Nakamura Kanzaburo. That kind of lineage tends to either crush a performer or turn them into a footnote to someone else's fame, and she avoided both by claiming a stage that was distinctly her own. Choosing the less spectacular tradition strikes me as the interesting decision here. Her recognitions, the Medal with Purple Ribbon in 2011, the Order of the Rising Sun in 2016, and the Kikuta Kazuo Drama Award, read less like prizes for a single hit than acknowledgment of decades of showing up. That she is still a woman of the theatre in her eighties is, to me, the whole story.

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.

Name (English)

Kuriko Namino

Name (Japanese)

波乃久里子

Reading

なみの くりこ

Born

December 1, 1945 (age 80)

Origin

Kamakura, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan

Height

159 cm

Occupation

actor

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Sagittarius / Rooster

Blood type

O

Active years

1950 -

Awards & achievements

• 2011 Medal with Purple Ribbon
• Kikuta Kazuo engeki shō
• 2016 The Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Rosette

Works summary

Appearances

124 (1950–2025)

By year (titles with a known year)

1950: 1, 1964: 1, 1966: 3, 1967: 4, 1968: 2, 1969: 1, 1970: 2, 1971: 1, 1972: 2, 1973: 2, 1975: 3, 1976: 4, 1977: 5, 1978: 4, 1979: 4, 1980: 2, 1981: 1, 1983: 1, 1984: 1, 1988: 1, 1990: 2, 1992: 2, 1994: 5, 1995: 1, 1997: 1, 1998: 1, 2000: 2, 2002: 1, 2003: 2, 2006: 2, 2007: 2, 2008: 6, 2009: 3, 2010: 2, 2011: 1, 2013: 2, 2014: 6, 2015: 2, 2016: 3, 2017: 2, 2018: 3, 2019: 3, 2020: 2, 2024: 4, 2025: 2, year unknown: 17

Debut work

十七世中村勘三郎襲名披露初春大歌舞伎

Filmography / notable works

• Official sitehttps://www.shochiku.co.jp/shinpa/actors/kuriko
• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuriko%20Namino
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%B3%A2%E4%B9%83%E4%B9%85%E9%87%8C%E5%AD%90
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q3544366

Tags

• Kanagawa Prefecture
• actor

Last updated

September 29, 2026

Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. 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.