Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa

Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa
田川 洋行
Tagawa in 2011
Born(1950-09-27)27 September 1950
Higashi-Azabu, Tokyo, Japan
Died4 December 2025(2025-12-04) (aged 75)
Other names
  • Cary Tagawa
  • Panteleimon
Citizenship
  • Japan (expatriate)
  • United States
  • Russia
EducationUniversity of Southern California
Occupations
  • Actor
  • martial artist
  • film producer
Years active1986–2024
Spouse
Sally Phillips Petersen
(m. 1984; div. 2014)
Children3

Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa (Japanese: 田川 洋行, romanizedTagawa Hiroyuki; 27 September 1950 – 4 December 2025) was a Japanese actor and film producer who was best known for his role as the evil shapeshifter sorcerer Shang Tsung in various works of the Mortal Kombat franchise: he first played the character in the 1995 film adaptation, and reprised it in 2013 for the television series Mortal Kombat: Legacy and in 2019 for the video game Mortal Kombat 11. He appeared as Lt. A.J. Shimamura on 15 episodes of the American television series Nash Bridges.

Often cast as villains, he became known for his film roles in: The Last Emperor (1987), the James Bond film Licence to Kill (1989), Showdown in Little Tokyo (1991), American Me (1992), Rising Sun (1993), Mortal Kombat (1995), The Phantom (1996), Snow Falling on Cedars (1999), Pearl Harbor (2001), Planet of the Apes (also 2001), Memoirs of a Geisha (2005), Tekken (2009), 47 Ronin (2013), Tekken 2: Kazuya's Revenge (2014), and Kubo and the Two Strings (2016). He starred as Trade Minister Nobusuke Tagomi on the Amazon Prime television series The Man in the High Castle (2015–2018), and Hiroki Watanabe on the Netflix series Lost in Space (2018–2021).