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Yuko Takeuchi’s five best films: remembering the popular Japanese actress, found dead at 40
- Actress played a detective in TV series Strawberry Night, appeared in J-horror Ring and was a versatile performer in romantic, horror and dramatic roles
- Takeuchi was found dead by at her Tokyo home in an apparent suicide. Her death follows the recent suicides of performers Sei Ashina and Haruma Miura
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Japanese actress Yuko Takeuchi was found dead at her family home in Tokyo on Sunday morning by her husband, the actor Taiki Nakabayashi.
The cause of death is presumed to be suicide, making the 40-year-old mother of two the latest in a string of high-profile performers in Japan to take their own lives in recent months, following the deaths of Sei Ashina earlier this month and Haruma Miura in July.
A prolific film and television actress, Takeuchi found fame in the 1996 Fuji TV drama Cyborg, and scored a small yet pivotal role in Hideo Nakata’s J-horror classic Ring (1998), as the teenage niece of Nanako Matsushima’s heroine, and the first on-screen victim of the cursed videotape.
In the decades since, she has transitioned between cinema and television, finding commercial success and critical acclaim. Highlights include Asuka (1999), The Queen of Lunch (2002), and as police detective Reiko Himekawa in the long-running series Strawberry Night.
In 2018, Miss Sherlock saw Takeuchi star as a female version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s genius detective. She played opposite Shihori Kanjiya, as a female Watson, in modern-day Tokyo, and the eight-part series garnered favourable reviews at home and abroad, particularly for its lead actresses.
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