Internationally acclaimed theater director Yukio Ninagawa has staged countless plays in Japan, elsewhere in Asia, and in the United States and Europe.
Born in Saitama Prefecture on Oct. 15, 1935, he began his 47-year stage career as an actor with the Seihai Theater Co. in Tokyo, before switching to directing in 1969 and making his debut with Kunio Shimizu's "Shinsei Afureru Keihakusa (Hearty but Flippant)." Since then, he has tackled many of the classics of Western theater -- including Shakespeare, Sophocles and Chekhov -- as well as Japanese classics such as "Chikamatsu Shinju Monogatari (Suicide for Love)," based on the works of Chikamatsu Monzaemon.
His distinctively vivid productions bridging Japanese and Western theatrical traditions have won him fans the world over -- though not without generating some controversy among critics and scholars of Western theater.