Nakahara Sanae was a Japanese actress from Tokyo. She starred in over 80 films and television shows, the most prominent being her role in the films Lady Snowblood (1973), Yagyu Clan Conspiracy (1978), and Day of Resurrection (1980). Her husband was famed Japanese film director Kinji Fukasaku, and her son, Kenta Fukasaku, is another well-known Japanese film director.

She graduated from the Kunimoto Girls' High School. Her mother was a stage actress and raised her after divorcing her father.

She married Fukasaku Kinji, who at the time was a young director at Toei. They had no meetings and he gave her no acting guidance, but after the film he took, as she described, a furious approach with letters and phone calls. They decided to get married after being together for only 3 months. Whenever he directed his own staring actresses, the media was taken with stories of the crisis of their marriage. She continued to support her husband’s filmmaking.

She first starred in the film Village Eight minutes while still in high school, a film about the Shizuoka Prefecture Ueno village ostracism incident. Two years later she signed an exclusive contract with Japanese movie studio Nikkatsu, appearing in films such as Season of the Sun. She appeared in around 80 works over the next 8 years before becoming independent and acting for other studios.

Her most recent work had mainly been appearances on stage.

She died in her home on May 15th, 2012. An apartment manager, at the request of her son, entered her home and found her collapsed in the bathroom. Doctors confirmed her death at the hospital with the cause of death being heart failure.

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