James Shigeta 'Led The Way' For Asian-American Lovers On Screen
Actor James Shigeta had the looks, the talent — and the voice.
"It's melodious. It's deep. There is something quite sensuous about it," says L.S. Kim, a film professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Kim adds that Shigeta — who died from pulmonary failure on Monday in Beverly Hills at age 85, according to his agent Jeffrey Leavitt — embodied an unusual sight on the big screen: a self-assured Asian-American man.
"In many portrayals of Asian-American men in particular, there is no sense of confidence. And with James Shigeta, his screen presence was as deep and seductive as his voice," Kim says.
A co-star of the 1961 movie musical Flower Drum Song, Shigeta broke barriers on screen as one of Hollywood's first Asian-American actors to play romantic lead characters. In Bridge to the Sun, a 1961 film based on a memoir of the same name, Shigeta played Hidenari Terasaki, a dashing Japanese diplomat from Tokyo who meets cute and later marries Gwen Harold, a young white woman from Johnson City, Tenn.