Inoue Mao | 井上 真央 | About

Inoue Mao has acted since she was five. Her mother pushed her towards acting, art and music at four; she was not especially taken with acting until the first fan letter arrived, and then she stayed. She was known as a child for TBS's "Kids War" series, and stopped working in 2004 to sit her university entrance exams.

She came back in 2005 with "Hana Yori Dango", as Makino Tsukushi — the scholarship girl at a school full of heirs — and won Best Actress at the 47th Television Drama Academy Awards for it. The sequel in 2007 brought a run of prizes, and the film "Hana Yori Dango: Final" (2008) was the highest-grossing live-action release in Japan that year. She graduated from Meiji University in 2009, having read theatre, taken Chinese as her second language, and written her thesis on the actress Sugimura Haruko.

"Rebirth" (2011) won her a Japan Academy Prize, and "Ohisama", NHK's 84th morning serial, won her Best Actress at the 70th Television Drama Academy Awards. She chaired the red team at that year's Kohaku Uta Gassen — the first female-led red team to win it in seven years. "The Eternal Zero" (2013) topped the Japanese box office for eight straight weeks, and she led "The Snow White Murder Case" the following March. In 2015 she carried NHK's 54th taiga drama, "Hana Moyu", as Sugi Fumi; it drew the worst ratings in the strand's history, and she took the blame in public — "I am the starring actress, so it has to be from my lack of ability" — then stepped back for eighteen months.

She left Seventh Avenue in 2016, worked independently for a while, and joined UN et NEUF with the help of the actor Kishibe Ittoku. She has voiced two animated films, appeared on stage in "MIWA" (2013) and "Anger" (2016), and returned to features with "Sunset Sunrise" (2025). She speaks Japanese, English and Mandarin, paints animals and landscapes in oils, and received Prince William on his 2015 visit to Japan.