Tetsuro Tamba: The Japanese actor Tetsuro Tamba, who has died aged 84, was a recognisable face to that large group of film fans from the West who are followers of Asian genre movies.

He was seen in every conceivable kind of film - disaster, gangster, samurai, war and horror, as well as a number of art films. In an acting career that began in 1954, Tamba made more than 200 films; he admitted that he never refused a role, never memorised a script - and never sat through an entire film that he appeared in.

One of his most well-known roles internationally was in Lewis Gilbert's You Only Live Twice(1967), the fifth James Bond movie starring Sean Connery.

Tamba played Tiger Tanaka, head of the Japanese secret service, who helps Bond save the world from destruction.

The character is the mirror of Bond-san: he has a witty and sarcastic sense of humour, dresses smartly, is in perfect physical condition and has a taste for beautiful women. When Bond makes contact with him, he uses the password, "I love you".

One of the best exchanges between them is when they are being bathed by Tanaka's women.

Tanaka: "You know what it is about you that fascinates them, don't you? It's the hair on your chest. All Japanese men have beautiful bare skin."

Bond: "Japanese proverb say 'Bird never make nest in bare tree'."

Gilbert also directed Tamba in The Seventh Dawn(1964). In the Malaya of 1945, he and William Holden are two pals who fought the Japanese together during the war but are now on opposing sides - Holden, an imperialist rubber plantation owner, and Tamba, a communist guerilla.

In another English-language film, Tamba played an ideological baddie in Bridge to the Sun(1961), as a militaristic diplomat at odds with a friend who married an American woman (Carroll Baker) before Pearl Harbor.

He was born Shozaburo Tanba (he is sometimes credited as Tesuro Tamba) in Tokyo, the son of the emperor's personal doctor. After some years under contract to Shintoho studios, he went freelance in 1959 and began starring in films, mostly yakusa, jidai-geki (period) movies and gore spectacles. For example, he was the unheeded professor who predicts The Last Days of Planet Earth(1974).

But he also worked with some of Japan's best directors, including Shohei Imamura ( Pigs and Battleships, 1961, 11'09'01 - September 11th, 2002), Masaki Kobayashi( Harakiri, 1962, Kwaidan, 1964), Kinji Fukasaku (Under the Flag of the Rising Sun, 1972), and Juzo Itami (A Taxing Woman Returns, 1988).

Towards the end of his life, Tamba made a few films for Takashi Miike: The Happiness of the Katakuris(2001) and Gozu(2003), in the former as a stern grandfather. He also had a cameo role as a harsh art critic in Teruo Ishii's Blind Beast vs Killer Dwarf(2001).

In the 1980s, while appearing in about seven films a year, Tamba became leader of Dai Reien Kai (Great Spirit World), a spiritual cult movement, for which he made several propaganda videos based upon his theories of the afterlife.

He is survived by his son, the actor Yoshitaka Tanba.

Tetsuro Tamba (Shozaburo Tanba), born July 17th, 1922; died September 25th, 2006.