Setsuko Hara: Actress adored in Japan and abroad for her sensitivity and best known for her work with Yasujiro Ozu

She was the Garbo of Japan, the great shining star of the golden era in Japanese film making. In his autobiography, the actor Ken Takakura, best known for his role in Sydney Pollock's The Yakuza, describes the vision of Setsuko Hara walking through the indifferent hordes of commuters in Shinjuku Station: she moved among them within an indefinable aura of mystery, a physical presence so discreet, it could hardly be called present at all. The atmosphere of purity and mystic innocence surrounding her was partly a reflection of her private life, shrouded in the utmost discretion.

She was averse to publicity and rarely gave interviews. She never married, and she is not known to have had any love affairs. There was a rumour that she might marry Yasujiro Ozu, who directed her in most of her finest films, but it was only a rumour. Hara was known affectionately, regretfully, as "The Eternal virgin."

She attended the refined Yokohama Ladies' Seminary from 1933. In August 1934, her fresh, modest yet ebullient personality and her radiantly simple beauty led her to be recommended as a possible addition to Nikkatsu Movie company's list of "new faces".

Her father, Fujinosuke Aida, was a lowly salaryman, but his second daughter had become an actress and the wife of Hisatora Kumagai, a young director. Setsuko's playful charm and childlike spontaneity of feeling had made her popular with children, so she had decided to become a schoolteacher. But with the deterioration of her family's finances, she could not envisage a continuation of higher education.

In her first casting photos, her skin appeared rather dark. Though she had a fine profile, her frontal shots revealed her as too thin and underdeveloped. However, her brother-in-law Hisatora, convinced that she had the makings of a good actress, invited the film company's casting directors to his home to meet Setsuko in a more relaxed atmosphere. The subtle aura she diffused was enough.

At the time, Nikkatsu had few talented young actresses, so Setsuko seemed likely to fill a need for a certain type of traditional Japanese girl. In August 1935 she made her film debut at 15 in Tetsu Taguchi's Tamerau nakare wakodo yo (Don't hesitate young people!). In this young people's film, she took the name of Setsuko Hara. In that same year, the leading actress billed to appear in Midori no Chiheisen (Green Horizon) committed suicide, and Setsuko took over her part in this first-class film. Her performance revealed her as a potential star, with her happy smile, innocent, open gaze, wide, sparkling eyes and classic profile.

She came to prominence as an actress in the 1937 German-Japanese co-production Die Tochter des Samurai (The Daughter of the Samurai), known in Japan as Atarashiki Tsuchi (The New Earth), directed by Arnold Fanck and Mansaku Itami. She went to Germany for the film's opening, and after studying German for a month could speak the language passably. Her grace, youth, radiant smile and demure demeanour enchanted the Germans.

Hara went on to Paris, then New York and Hollywood, where she met Josef von Sternberg, Marlene Dietrich, Barbara Stanwyck and Luise Rainer, but no attempt was made to put her under contract in Paris or Los Angeles.

It was not until the end of the war that her career began to take off, in Kurosawa's Waga seishu ni kuinashi (Mr Springtime, No Regrets, 1946). She acted with real passion, and was an impressive leading lady, and her popularity started to soar. She always appeared on screen as an intelligent, refined, elegant, serious, young lady. She was untouched by social revolutions in Japanese postwar life, and in that depressed period her enchanting smile seemed to give people consolation and hope for a better future. In the confusions of postwar society, her delicacy and tenderness were an inspiration.

As an actress she had begun with a rather stiff, mechanical technique, but experience softened her style and in Yasujiro Ozu's Banshun (Late spring, 1949) she touched everyone's heart as a motherless daughter living with her professor father, taking care of him with true affection and self-effacement, thus missing her chances of marriage, which she is finally persuaded to embark upon. This film, the first of several she made with Ozu, was voted No 1 in the year-end charts.

Hara's most famous films belong to the 1950s. In 1951 she played in Kurosawa's Hakuchi, based on Dostoevsky's The Idiot, as Natasha, the mistress of a wealthy man longing to lead a purer life.

In the same year, her next film with Ozu, Bakusha (Early Summer) became the year's No 1 hit, followed by the No 2, Mikio Naruse's Meshi (A Bowl of Rice) in which she gave one of her best performances. Those three films are classics of the Japanese cinema. Her director, Ozu, said, "She can act from the very depths of her being, and always has a quick understanding of her part. When I am giving her direction, she always responds intelligently and instinctively, a wonderful natural actress." Ozu's traditional Japanese interiors, shot from tatami floor level, were perfect settings for her.

In 1953 came the greatest of the Ozu/Hara films, Tokyo Monogatari (Tokyo Story). The shooting began in June, directed by Hara's brother-in-law as Ozu's assistant, and with her second brother as cameraman. The latter was taking a shot of an approaching train in Gotemba station when the train failed to stop in time: he was run over and died. In these sad circumstances, which intensified the peculiar melancholy of the story, Hara began playing her greatest part, that of a young war widow, a devoted daughter-in-law who takes care of her ageing parents-in-law when they leave their country home to spend a few days with their son and his abrasive wife (the inimitable Haruko Sugiyama) in their cramped Tokyo home.

It is a deeply moving film, in which Setsuko's fine performance is backed by the excellent characterisations of Chishu Ryu and Chieko Higashiyama as her parents-in-law. Tokyo Story is universal in its appeal, and one of the greatest masterpieces of Japanese cinematic art.

In 1954, Hara made another film with Mikio Naruse, Yama no oto (A Rumbling in the mountains). Setsuko, now 34, was at her peak period as an actress, and the fact that she chose to remain unmarried seemed to add an extra almost ethereal dimension of spiritual distinction to her art. Her lovely eyes were still full of tenderness and sparkles of mischievous humour. But she had developed cataract in her left eye: this was successfully operated on, but seemed an omen of coming decline.

Hara next appeared in Hisatora Kumagai's Non-chan kumo ni noru (Non-chan in the Clouds, 1955), based on a well-loved children's classic. Newspaper headlines joyfully announced: "Beautiful Eyes Return to the Screen!" The film marked another significant step in her career: it was the first time she had played a mother. There followed a succession of almost elegiac autumnal Ozu masterpieces: Tokyo boshoku (Tokyo Twilight, 1957; Aki biyori (Autumn skies, 1960); and Kohayagawake no aki (Autumn of the Kohayagawa Family, 1961). Hara, with her quiet, spellbinding intensity and grace, began to seem to belong to another age.

Hara and Ozu: there is an underlying sense of some disturbing secret that emanates from these two unmarried artists, the sadness of an emotional difference that their condition arouses in the spectators, and indefinable strain of sexual perversity. They seem to be telling us that human lives are not what they seem, and that an acceptable social exterior is not everything.

In an enthralling book on Ozu, Shigehiko Hasumi argues, against critics like Paul Schrader, Donald Richie and Audie Bock that all was not simple sweetness and light in the films he made with Setsuko Hara. She was apparently in love with her much older director, a father figure who had no intention of marrying anybody, and so treated her rather distantly. Unlike Hasumi, I see their relationship more like that between the dutiful daughter and the father in Banshun: one of pure devotion, with a sublimated sexual need.

In 1962, Setsuko appeared in her last film, one of the countless versions of Chushingura, a historical epic in which she is obviously ill at ease. She retired from the screen at 42, feeling there were no more parts for her to play. The type of young girl and woman she had portrayed to such perfection was already vanishing from modern Japan. Like Garbo and Dietrich, she retired not only from the screen, but also from public life. The Japarazzi managed to take only one shot of her at home; she did not want her fans to witness her beauty in decline. The Eternal Virgin remained one to the end of her days, her veil of mystery unbroken.

Masae Aida (Setsuko Hara), actress: born 17 June 1920; died Kanagawa, Japan 5 September 2015.

James Kirkup died in 2009.