Yōko Sugi

Tokyo, Japan

Yōko Sugi (8 October 1928 – 15 May 2019) was a Japanese actress mainly active in the 1950s, who appeared in films of Mikio Naruse, Kinuyo Tanaka and Tadashi Imai. Sugi was born on 28 October 1928 in what is now Bunkyō Ward, Tokyo, Japan. In 1947, she auditioned at Toho studio's "New Face" competition and received a contract. She debuted in Tadashi Imai's 1949 Aoi Sanmyaku, and performed in several other coming of age films. She repeatedly appeared in films of Mikio Naruse, including Repast, Husband and Wife, and Sound of the Mountain, and in Kinuyo Tanaka's Forever a Woman and The Moon Has Risen. In 1962, Sugi married an American, retired from the entertainment industry, and moved to the United States, where she worked as a public relations manager at the New Otani Hotel in Los Angeles. Occasionally returning to Japan, she appeared in films like Shirō Toyoda's The Twilight Years. She served as a Japanese Cultural Envoy to the United States for the Agency for Cultural Affairs in 2005. Sugi moved back to Japan in 2017. She died of cancer on May 15, 2019.