Tamako Katsura

Born in the summer of 1912 in Takamatsu, Okayama, Tamako Katsura belongs to a generation so far removed from ours that even calling her a "classic" feels like an understatement — she arrived in the world the same year the Titanic sank and Japan's Meiji era came to a close. She was an actress, and that simple fact carries a lot of weight when you stop to think about what it meant to be a woman pursuing that life in early twentieth-century Japan: the stages, the social scrutiny, the whole arc of wartime and postwar transformation she would have lived through. Orphaned young, she was scouted while working at a department store in Osaka and debuted at 18 in 1931, going on to star in The French Doll (1933), and I find that path from shop floor to screen quietly compelling.

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.

Tamako Katsura was a Japanese actor born on July 15, 1912, in Takamatsu, Okayama Prefecture. She was born in the year of the Rat and under the sign of Cancer, belonging to a generation that lived through the Meiji, Taisho, and Showa eras. Scouted while working at the Takashimaya department store in Osaka, she debuted in 1931 with Teikoku Kinema, and The French Doll (1933) became her signature film.

Name (English)

Tamako Katsura

Name (Japanese)

桂珠子

Reading

かつら たまこ

Born

July 15, 1912

Origin

Takamatsu, Okayama Prefecture, Japan

Occupation

Actor

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Cancer / Rat

• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%A1%82%E7%8F%A0%E5%AD%90
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q11536839

Tags

• From Okayama Prefecture
• Actor

Last updated

November 2, 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. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.