Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa has died at the age of 75.

The Japanese-American actor, who played sorcerer Shang Tsung in the 1995 movie of the video game Mortal Kombat, died of complications from a stroke on Thursday morning in Santa Barbara while surrounded by his children, Deadline reports.

Tagawa's big break came with Bernardo Bertolucci's 1987 epic The Last Emperor, in which he played a Chinese eunuch.

From there, he built a glittering Hollywood career that included the James Bond movie License to Kill, the World War II action movie Pearl Harbour, and Memoirs of a Geisha.

He also made guest appearances on a number of hit TV shows, including Miami Vice, MacGyver and Baywatch.

His best-remembered role was Shang Tsung, a character he played not just on film but also for two TV shows and two in Mortal Kombat video games.

Mortal Kombat was a huge box office success and Tagawa attributed that in part to the "genius" of its director, Paul WS Anderson, who "was the first one in martial arts history to apply such music, really upbeat, driving metal kind of music", he told Red Carpet TV.

"You couldn't sit still when you heard the music, and it matched the action so well that I think it just became like an anthem."

Tagawa's last role was as the ambivalent Japanese minister Nobusuke Tagomi in the Amazon series The Man in the High Castle from 2015 to 2018.

He married his wife Sally in 1984 and welcomed three children with her - a son and two daughters - whom they raised on the Hawaiian island of Kauai.