Keiko Kitagawa

Keiko Kitagawa, born 22 August 1986 in Hyogo Prefecture and raised in Kobe, is one of the most established leading actresses working in Japanese film and television. She was still at school, and had once expected to become a doctor, when a talent agency approached her; her parents agreed only on two terms, that she walk away if nothing came of it inside a year and that her studies come first. She kept the bargain, finishing her degree at Tokyo's Meiji University in March 2009. Within a week of signing she had been picked as both a model and an actress, she took the Miss Seventeen title in 2003, and she stayed an exclusive Seventeen model until she aged out of the magazine in 2006. Her acting career opened with Rei Hino in Toei's live-action Sailor Moon, the first role she ever had. As the shrine maiden who fights as Sailor Mars, she anchored the coolest and most guarded corner of the team through the 49-Act run of 2003 and 2004, and she cut a single in character in 2004 pairing Sakura Fubuki with Hoshi Furu Yoake. The film Mamiya Kyodai, and its director Yoshimitsu Morita, convinced her to abandon modelling for acting outright. A long stretch of lead roles followed: Cherry Pie and Dear Friends on film, then Mop Girl in late 2007, Homeroom on the Beachside, Buzzer Beat, The After-Dinner Mysteries, Akumu-chan and Hero on television, with an early Hollywood credit in The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. She married the singer-songwriter Daigo in 2016, and that same year was named Best Actress at the Japanese Television Academy Awards for her work in Ie Uru Onna. Sailor Moon pulled her back two decades later. In June 2023 the production of the two-part film Sailor Moon Cosmos revealed that she would voice Sailor Cosmos and Guardian Cosmos, the director and producers having approached her once they decided the character's solemnity called for someone other than Kotono Mitsuishi, the long-running voice of Usagi. Kitagawa queried the offer at first, since Sailor Cosmos is presented as an ultimate future form of Sailor Moon herself. Her 2023 photobook, titled 37, marked twenty years since the live-action series started her career. She is managed by Stardust Promotion, and has a daughter born in 2020 and a son born in January 2024.