Ken Ogata, 71, leading man in Japanese films and on TV

NEW YORK - Ken Ogata, a versatile and prolific leading man in Japanese films and on Japanese television who also appeared in movies directed by Peter Greenaway and Paul Schrader, died on Oct. 5 in Tokyo. He was 71.

The Mainichi newspapers of Japan said the cause was liver cancer, citing Mr. Ogata's family.

On Sept. 30, Mr. Ogata appeared at a press conference to publicize a new television series on which he plays an aging doctor.

Japanese news reports said he showed no sign of illness. The series, "Kaze no Garden" ("Garden of the Wind"), was first broadcast four days after his death.

A favorite of Shohei Imamura, a director who cast him in five films, Mr. Ogata first made his name in the West playing a brutal serial killer in Imamura's 1979 film "Vengeance Is Mine," in which he vacillated between two emotional poles, impassivity and rage.

A second Imamura film, "The Ballad of Narayama" (1983), in which he played a man who, according to his village's harsh tradition, must leave his aging mother to die on a nearby mountain, won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

For his performance Mr. Ogata won the Japanese equivalent of the Oscar.

His best-known performance in an English-language film was as a calligrapher in "The Pillow Book" (1996), directed by Greenaway; the film, a lushly erotic work, is about a young woman who takes sensuous pleasure from having her skin written on.

In 1985, in Schrader's controversial "Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters," Mr. Ogata played Yukio Mishima, the flamboyant Japanese novelist and nationalist who raised his own private army and died in a public suicide.

Mishima's widow condemned the film, which was barred from the Tokyo Film Festival and has never been released in Japan.

"Ken Ogata was a brave and talented actor," Schrader wrote in an e-mail from Israel. "He took chances in a system which discouraged risk-taking, and succeeded mightily."