Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, the actor known for his roles in “The Last Emperor,” “The Man in the High Castle” and the “Mortal Kombat” films, died on Thursday in Santa Barbara, Calif. He was 75.
Penny Vizcarra, Mr. Tagawa’s publicist, and Margie Weiner, his manager, confirmed his death and said the cause was complications from a stroke. Mr. Tagawa was with his family when he died, Ms. Vizcarra added.
Over a career that spanned more than three decades, Mr. Tagawa notched dozens of film and television credits. He got a break early in his career when he was cast in “The Last Emperor,” Bernardo Bertolucci’s Oscar-winning 1987 film.
“It was mind boggling. You know, to suddenly be working with one of the top-10 directors in the world,” Mr. Tagawa told the A.V. Club in a 2015 interview.
Roles in a number of high-profile projects followed, including the 1989 James Bond film “Licence to Kill.” Mr. Tagawa played the hotheaded Eddie Sakamura in “Rising Sun,” the 1993 film adaptation of the Michael Crichton novel with a cast that included Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes.
Later in the 1990s came what Mr. Tagawa described as a game-changer for his career: the role of the soul-stealing sorcerer Shang Tsung in the 1995 film adaptation of “Mortal Kombat,” the hit fighting video game. He reprised the role in subsequent Mortal Kombat films and television shows and also lent his voice to video games in the series.
Mr. Tagawa also appeared in “Pearl Harbor” (2001) and the 2005 film “Memoirs of a Geisha.”
Later in his career, he was cast in a major role in Amazon’s critically acclaimed “The Man in the High Castle,” which premiered in 2015. Mr. Tagawa played Nobusuke Tagomi, a soft-spoken Japanese trade minister who is trying to prevent another war, in this adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s novel of the same name, which imagines a world in which the Axis powers emerged victorious after World War II.
Mr. Tagawa said the character had parallels to his own experience as an Asian American growing up in the United States after the war.
“The East-West paradigm is nothing new to me — it’s something I’ve dealt with my whole life — so that really gives me an opportunity to represent it at a very deep level and provides a very wide perspective of being in America and being Japanese,” Mr. Tagawa said in the A.V. Club interview.
Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa was born on Sept. 27, 1950, in Tokyo. He moved to the United States when he was 5 years old, and was raised in the South by a military family. He later moved to Los Angeles, where he taught martial arts, according to a statement from his family.
Mr. Tagawa is survived by his wife, Sally Phillips; his children, Calen, Byrnne and Cana; and two grandchildren, River and Thea Clayton.
Qasim Nauman is a Times editor in Seoul, covering breaking news from around the world.
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