Eiko Ando

Who is Eiko Ando?

Eiko Ando was a Japanese actress best known for appearing opposite John Wayne in The Barbarian and the Geisha in 1958.

Ando was born in Harbin, in the Heilongjiang Province of Northeast China, to a Japanese industrialist. When the Communists took over the family fled back to Japan. After her father died in 1953, she went to work as a singer and then as a burlesque dancer. At the time of filming for The Barbarian and the Geisha she was 5 feet 7 inches and weighed 115 pounds. When director John Huston was looking for an actress for the part of Okichi, a friend of Ando's who worked in the Tokyo office of 20th Century-Fox recommended Ando to Huston. Once Huston saw her, after auditioning 33 other actresses, he and producer Eugene Frenke were done looking, mainly because of her height over the other women.