Rinko Kikuchi may have missed out on an Oscar, but her best supporting actress nomination alone is going to make her a hundred times more attractive for advertisers, according to Josei Seven (3/13).
Kikuchi dazzled on the red carpet outside the Kodak Theater in Los Angeles, with her hair up and decked out in a chic strapless black Chanel gown — a far cry from some of her previous wardrobe clangers.
Kikuchi was a virtual unknown before her nomination; but shouldn’t have been, considering she had appeared in 16 feature length movies.
“She’s been in more than 25 TV commercials, so is something of a secret ‘ad queen,’” a movie industry insider tells Josei Seven. “She’s the type who busts their guts even when only playing a bit part and for some reason has an ability to make her fellow cast members stand out, too. She really, really, really loves movies. It’s something she inherited from her cinema-loving father.”
Kikuchi’s father encouraged his daughter to love the big screen so much she virtually ignored what was happening on the small screen — almost unheard of among her generation.
“I can remember she used to go off to the chop socky samurai movies with her dad,” a one-time neighbor of the Kikuchi family tells the women’s weekly.
Kikuchi’s dad ran a machinery parts company and her family — parents and a brother — lived a comfortable existence. That serene lifestyle, however, was shattered when Kikuchi’s father died of a massive heart attack when she was still just a sixth grader.
Even after her father’s demise, Kikuchi continued watching the flicks, spending her free time during her junior high school years to race off to the movies whenever she could, often doing so alone.
“It’s around that time she decided she wanted to be an actress. She wanted to show her father in Heaven that she could act,” a showbiz source says. “She would take on the toughest roles she could find and then tackle them, giving it whatever it took and never complaining once.”
Kikuchi made her feature length movie debut in 1999″s “Ikitai,” for which she received critical, but not popular, acclaim. It was a similar story throughout her career.
“She was working as a pub waitress getting 900 yen an hour,” the showbiz source says.
Then, in September 2004, Kikuchi got her break, though she didn’t realize it at the time. She learned that Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu was carrying out auditions for a deaf Japanese teenage girl. Kikuchi was determined to make the role her own. She spent a year attending a school for the deaf and learned sign language, which she used throughout her daily lifestyle to familiarize herself with it to the point where it appeared natural.
When she eventually got the role, she hurled herself into it, including its steamy sex scenes where she had to appear nude. She was rewarded with the Academy Award nomination and a significant boost to her career prospects. Since being nominated in late January, Kikuchi has signed on for one more Hollywood flick and another two Japanese features. Her TV ad work, frequent in the past, now looks likely to also metamorphose into being lucrative.
“Just getting an Oscar nomination alone is enormous,” a movie industry insider tells Josei Seven. “She’s known not just in Japan, but also throughout the world. She would have been getting about 200,000 yen to 300,000 yen when she was an unknown actress, but this Academy Award nomination will probably make her price 100 times more than that.” [by coffeebean]
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