Mako, the Japanese born actor who gained famed when he portrayed Po-han, the Chinese worker on a U.S. Naval ship in Robert Wise's The Sand Pebbles (1966) and won an Oscar® nomination for supporting actor in the process, died on July 21 in Somis, California of esophageal cancer. He was 72.

He was born Makoto Iwamatsu in Kobe, Japan, on December 10, 1933. His parents left to study art in New York when he was five, and Mako stayed behind to be raised by his grandparents. Due to the fact that his parents lived on the East Coast, they were not interned during World War II (internment camps for Japanese-Americans were on the West Coast, given the fact that their location was closer to the Pacific). They worked for the U.S. Office of War Information and were eventually given residency. In 1949, Mako joined them.

Originally, he had designs on becoming an architect. He enrolled in the Pratt Institute in New York, but his schooling took a detour when an acquaintance asked him to design a set and do lighting for an off-Broadway family play. Mako had his first taste of professional theater, and after a two-year stint with the U.S. military, he moved to California to train in drama at the Pasadena Playhouse.

Mako drifted into television by the '60s, appearing in several episodes of McHale's Navy, I Spy and I Dream of Jeannie, yet those appearances in no way prepared him for his next assignment being cast alongside Steve McQueen and Richard Attenborough in The Sand Pebbles (1966). Although the outline of his character Po-han was subservient to the white sailors by design, Mako elevated the character with such astounding humor and dignity, that in the final scene when he is killed by Chinese dissidents, the resulting tragedy is as powerful as anything else in the film.

To many Asian-Americans, Mako's greatest contribution to the art of acting came when in 1965 he co-founded the East West Players in Los Angeles, the nation's first Asian American theater company. As the company's first artistic director, Mako worked hard to develop productions that worked away from stereotypes, and gave Asian-Americans a chance to sink their teeth into classics like Shakespeare and Beckett. Most impressively, he gave them a political voice, particularly when their 1981 season dealt with themes of the imprisonment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

In between his stage commitments, Mako kept up the pace in films: Conan the Barbarian (1982), Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988), Pacific Heights (1990), Seven Years in Tibet (1997), and Memoirs of a Geisha (2005). He also made television appearances on The West Wing, Monk, and JAG that refreshingly did not reference his ethnicity, ample proof that his work for equality amongst Asian-American actors was not in vain. He is survived by his wife Shizuko; and daughters Sala and Mimosa.

by Michael T. Toole