Costume designer Emi Wada was born on March 18, 1937, in Kyoto Prefecture. She married director Tsutomu Wada while studying at Kyoto City University of Arts. She began her career in costume design after working on costumes for a play directed by her husband. Her first film costume design was the 1972 American film "Marco," and she has since been active around the world. Her lavish costumes for Akira Kurosawa's "Ran" (1985) were highly praised, making her the first Japanese woman to win an Academy Award for Best Costume Design. She has also won Best Costume Design at the Hong Kong Film Awards, the most prestigious film award in the Chinese-speaking world, for "Killer Wolf/The White-Haired Witch" (1993), "The Soong Sisters" (1997), and "HERO" (2003). She also won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Costume Design for the stage production of "Oedipus Rex" in 1993, and the first woman to win the Oribe Award Grand Prix in 2007.