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Enid Tsui

Japanese actress Miho Nakayama, best known for her role in the 1995 film Love Letter, has been found dead in her home in Tokyo’s Ebisu district. She was 54.
Nakayama was found collapsed in her bathtub on December 6.
Her death was first reported by NHK, Japan’s national broadcaster. The cause of death is under investigation.
Nakayama was one of the biggest all-round pop stars to emerge from Japan in the 1980s, the period when J-pop was phenomenally successful across Asia and each week’s Oricon chart – the Japanese music chart – was closely followed by fans no less fervent than today’s K-pop supporters.

She had been due to appear in the Osaka performance of “Miho Nakayama Christmas Concert 2024 in Billboard Live” at Billboard Live Osaka on the day of her death, ahead of a “40th anniversary” national concert tour.
The show was cancelled because of her poor health.
Well before her unforgettable performance in Love Letter, the touching romance that broke box office records across Asia, Nakayama was already a huge star with a sweet, girl-next-door image.
She was discovered by a talent scout when she was in her first year of high school, and quickly became the face of brands such as TDK and Suntory when she was still in her early teens.
Her acting and singing careers both took off in 1985, a prolific year in which she acted in the TBS drama Maido Osawagase Shimasu and released her first single, “C”, which was the theme song for another TBS drama, Natsu Taiken Monogatari, in which she had her first starring role.

The way she and fellow 80s J-pop stars managed to act while churning out records might well have inspired Hong Kong stars to do the same, at a time when many Cantopop stars styled themselves after Japanese idols and sang cover versions of Oricon top singles.
Nakayama’s 1992 single “Sekaijū no Dare Yori Kitto”, made in collaboration with the band Wands, was among her earliest No 1 hits on the Oricon chart. It generated not one, but three Cantopop cover versions by Andy Hui Chi-on, Sammi Cheng Sau-man and Stephanie Lai Ming-sze the following year.
In Love Letter, she played both Hiroko Watanabe and Itsuki Fujii, the sister of the former’s dead fiancé.

Sometimes referred to as Japan’s most beautiful woman when her career was at its peak in the 1980s and 1990s, she also starred in numerous popular television series, such as A Sleeping Forest (1998) alongside the heartthrob Takuya Kimura.
In 2002, she married fellow singer Hitonari Tsuji and moved to Paris. She gave birth to a son in 2003. The couple divorced in 2014 after Nakayama was photographed kissing a younger man on the street, resulting in Tsuji having custody of their son.
She later mounted a comeback in Japan, mainly through acting in films and on stage.
Her last Instagram post was a photograph of a work by the late French artist Louise Bourgeois currently showing at Tokyo’s Mori Museum.












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A post shared by MIHO NAKAYAMA (@_miho_nakayama_)



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Miho Nakayama in Love Letter (1995). She has died aged 54.

Japanese actress Miho Nakayama appears in Tokyo in 2009 to promote Sayonara Itsuka, one of many films in which she appeared. Nakayama was found dead at home on December 6, 2024. Photo: Junko Kimura/Getty Images

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Film & TV

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Japanese actress best known for 1995’s Love Letter, who also had a stellar career as a singer, found dead at home, having cancelled a show


Japanese actress best known for 1995’s Love Letter, who also had a stellar career as a singer, found dead at home, having cancelled a show.


Cinema

Japan

Fame and celebrity