Ritsuo Sawa was a Japanese actor and voice actor born on December 20, 1935, in Tokyo. His career spanned several decades, with significant activity from the 1970s through the early 2000s. He was known for a distinctive, gruff, and husky vocal tone that made him a frequent choice for elderly characters, monsters, and authority figures in both anime and tokusatsu productions.

Sawa's early career included live-action roles, such as appearances in the long-running superhero franchise Kamen Rider, where he voiced numerous monster characters across multiple series in the 1970s. He established a strong presence in anime during its golden era, taking on character roles in seminal series. He voiced a schoolteacher in the 1979 Doraemon anime and Martin in the world masterpiece theater adaptation Anne of Green Gables, also from 1979. Throughout the 1980s, he was a familiar presence in the industry, with parts in series like Urusei Yatsura, where he was the long-standing voice of Lum's Father across several films and the television series.

Among his most notable anime roles is Youbu Ojiji, the calm grandfather of the heroine Himiko, in the popular series Mashin Hero Wataru. He also voiced Ryuzo Taiga, the grandfather of the protagonist, in the 1989 Sunrise action series Bio Armor Ryger. His film work included a role in the 1981 compilation film Mobile Suit Gundam Movie II as Connolly and a part in the 1999 Cardcaptor Sakura movie as an antique shop manager.

Sawa frequently collaborated with a core group of voice actors. His filmography shows repeated partnerships with contemporaries such as古川登志夫 (Toshio Furukawa), 小原乃梨子 (Noriko Ohara), 二又一成 (Issei Futamata), and 永井一郎 (Ichirō Nagai), particularly on the various Urusei Yatsura projects. He was a member of the theater company Atoru Echo (Theatre Eco).