Onodera Kumiko was born in Fujinomiya. She moved to Tokushima Prefecture, as her father was a chemistry teacher and also had to consider his health, and subsequently to Iwaki in the northern prefecture of Fukushima as a child and remained until graduation. Her father was from Hokkaido in northern Japan, but moved after contracting tuberculosis. Her mother was a nurse, which is how her parents met. Kumiko has a younger sister. She entered the acting profession at age eighteen. During her third year at high school a radio show announced a search for an actress for a movie called Tabi No Omasa ('Journey Into Solitude'). She auditioned without informing her parents. She came in second, but was accepted for the film and obtained the role of a girl who commits suicide. Her first work was in the Shochiku Studio movie Journey Into Solitude of 1972. Here she used her birth name for credits. She was happy with her approximately $800 salary. She nonetheless determined to attend university and was not bent on becoming an actress. Failing her university entrance examination changed things. She relocated to Tokyo. She appeared in a candy commercial. She was in a movie in 1973 and then changed her name and adopted an alias. As early as 1974 she won the Newcomer prize at the 11th Golden Arrow Award. 1974's Aka Chôchin made her famous. Aniimoto (1976) garnered her the award for Best Actress at Mainichi. She, or films in which she has appeared, have won awards regularly since. An international award came when Deep River won Montreal Film Festival Award in Canada in 1995. She released pop full-length albums in the mid-70s. She would later contribute lyrics to other singers' and bands' albums. One such band is Doggy Bag. She was married to composer Iwaku Shigeru from 1979 to 1989, which is a record ten years long. This was a shotgun wedding for her as she was pregnant at the time of her marriage. This became a minor scandal in Japan of the time. She paused her career for two years. She re-married her second ex-husband in 2006. She was initially married to the Japanese-American man from 2004 to 2005. She asserted that with her mother being ridden with cancer her priorities had changed and she appreciated her man. Her mother died in 2006. This second marriage lasted until 2014. She had had trouble with co-star Kenichi Hagiwara during the filming of Toukou No Ki. He was removed after he screamed and shouted at her and the film's director and became disruptive. Her son died in an accident in 2015. She often appears on talk shows on Japanese television. She has authored four books. She graduated from the prestigious Waseda university of Tokyo in Political Science in 2009. She cites Led Zeppelin, Nirvana and Soundgarden as bands to which she listens and reading, writing, travelling and yoga as favourite pastimes.