Actress Noriko Ohara, who gave voice to Doraemon character Nobita, dies at 88

TOKYO – Noriko Ohara, the Japanese voice actress who for decades played the role of Nobita in the beloved children’s show Doraemon, giving life to a main character in one of Japan’s longest-running television shows, has died. She was 88.

Her agency, 81 Produce, said in a statement on July 23 that she died on July 12 after unsuccessful treatment for an unspecified illness. The statement did not list the place of death or mention surviving family members.

Doraemon (1979 to 2005), the animated series in which the titular robot cat befriends Nobita, a 10-year-old boy struggling at school, is considered a staple among people in Japan.

Ohara’s voice became widely recognisable to many in the country as she played Nobita. She also starred in other popular anime, such as Yatterman (1977 to 1979), Future Boy Conan (1978) and Heidi, Girl Of The Alps (1974), as well as Japanese-dubbed versions of western films.

Her work won her multiple awards in Japan, including in the Anime Grand Prix and the Seiyu Awards, given to anime voice actors.

She began voicing Nobita, which she described as an intense task, in 1979 and played him until 2005.

The show was broadcast Mondays through Saturdays, and she was frequently required to record seven or eight episodes at a time, she said in a 2017 interview with Japanese news site Cinema Today.

“Working on Doraemon was like being an athlete,” she said. “I had to build up my stamina.”

She was born Noriko Tobe in Tokyo on Oct 2, 1935, said her agency. As a child, according to her website, she grew up listening to her parents read or tell her stories.

She also dreamt of becoming a writer like Jo March, a character in American novelist Louisa May Alcott’s novel Little Women, after seeing a movie adaptation.

In middle school, she said, she decided to become an actress like June Allyson, who played Jo in the American adaptation in 1949. As an adult, Ohara voiced the character in a Japanese version of the movie.

“Fifty years later, I became a voice actress and played the role of Jo,” she wrote. “Dreams come true!”

She began her career at a children’s theatre company, working in puppet shows and dramas, she said in the 2017 interview. She then worked on dubbing foreign films and television dramas, many from the United States, at a time when Japan was just starting to be introduced to dubbed media.

“I saw things I’d never seen in Japan, like garage doors opening with the flick of a remote control, or freezers and huge vacuum cleaners,” she said in the interview. “I was enjoying American culture, which is said to be 50 years ahead of Japan.”

While dubbing foreign films, she mostly voiced mature, elegant female characters, represented by actresses such as Jane Fonda, Shirley MacLaine and Catherine Deneuve. But in anime, Ohara often played boys. In Doraemon, it was a lazy and carefree schoolboy.

Outside of her job as a voice actress, she wrote on her website, performed poetry readings at universities, recorded fairy tales and offered classes to voice acting students.

Information on survivors was not immediately available. NYTIMES