Rinko Kikuchi
Rinko Kikuchi, born Yuriko Kikuchi on January 6, 1981, in Hadano, Kanagawa, Japan, is a Japanese actress. Discovered at 15 in Laforet Harajuku, she began her film career in 1999 with Will to Live. She rose to international fame for Babel (2006), becoming the first Japanese actress in 50 years to be nominated for an Academy Award, in the Best Supporting Actress category for playing Chieko Wataya, a deaf teenage girl. Notably, she was among the few Oscar nominees for a performance with no spoken lines.
Her other well-known films include Sora no Ana (2001), The Taste of Tea (2004), Norwegian Wood (2010), and Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim (2013). She received an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter (2014). Kikuchi has also appeared in English-language works, such as The Brothers Bloom (2009), where her character speaks only a few words, and 47 Ronin (2013). She acted in Mamoru Oshii’s The Sky Crawlers (2008) and Assault Girls (2009), and later joined the TV series Westworld (Season 2) and the HBO Max drama Tokyo Vice (2022) as Emi Maruyama.
In 2024, she was featured on the official poster of the 37th Tokyo International Film Festival and served as festival navigator. Kikuchi married actor Shōta Sometani on December 31, 2014, and they have two children, born in 2016 and 2018. She has also pursued music under the name Rinbjö.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 15:32 (CET).