Just like her character Soon-ja has, YOUN herself has captured the hearts of viewers around the world for her grace and talent, her ease in the limelight and her self-effacing humor. Ever since Minari bowed at the Sundance Film Festival last year, where it earned the Grand Prize, YOUN’s performance has been at the center of the buzz surrounding the beloved picture, which tells a classic American dream story through the eyes of a young Korean couple and their children, who move to Arkansas to start a farm in the 1980s.
Born in 1947, YOUN attended Hanyang University in Seoul and by 1967 had debuted on TV. Her film career kicked off in memorable fashion a few years later, when she played Myeong-ja, the lead character in
KIM Ki-young’s
Woman of Fire (1971), which was released 50 years ago this month.
The film, a remake of KIM’s earlier work
The Housemaid (1960), is built around YOUN’s fearless first silver screen role and would go on to become the most successful film of that year. The role earned YOUN her first major accolades, including the Best Actress prize at the Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival in Catalonia, Spain, Best Actress at the Blue Dragon Film Awards and Best New Actress at the Grand Bell Awards.
She teamed up with KIM again the following year for
Insect Woman(1972), which would also go on to top the yearly local box office. YOUN once again plays a character named Myeong-ja in a bold work that pushes boundaries and was far ahead of its time.
YOUN was active in other films and TV shows in this period but after she married singer-songwriter JO Young-nam in 1974, she put her career on hold and emigrated to the United States.
Though YOUN had achieved popularity in the early 1970s, in many ways she had to start all over again when she resumed her career, and for actresses considered middle-aged (though she was only in her mid to late 30s) the range of roles being offered to her may have been limited.
Over the years that followed YOUN was steadily active on the small screen but seldom appeared in films. Yet that would change in 2003, when she forged a crucial new relationship that reshaped her image in Korean film.
A Good Lawyer’s Wife (2003) was the first of seven films she’s made to date with director
IM Sang-soo. In it she plays Hong Byung-han, a grandmother who carries on an affair due to the lack of intimacy in her own marriage and comes clean about it and doesn’t break it off, even after her husband’s death. Byung-han is a character who lives for herself with her own set of values, which don’t conform with traditional patriarchal ones.
Breaking the mould for what kinds of characters senior actresses could play in Korean cinema, YOUN embarked on a colorful new stage of her film career, appending memorable roles to modern Korean classics such as IM’s next film
The President’s Last Bang (2005) and in
SONG hae-sung’s death row drama
Maundy Thursday (2006) as the spirited Sister Monica. She teamed up with SONG once more in 2013 for the family drama
Boomerang Family, but before that, she forged two new relationships that further solidified her unique image in the Korean film industry.
In 2009, she nominally played herself, a veteran screen doyenne in E J-yong’s terrific
Actresses. She took a similar part in E’s next film
Behind the Camera (2013), also a mockumentary, and then teamed up with him again in 2016 for perhaps the most daring role of her career, as the elderly prostitute cum euthanasia enabler So-young in
The Bacchus Lady.
The following year, she appeared in
Hahaha (2010), her first film with
HONG Sang-soo. Her signature mordant wit was on full display as the owner of a blowfish soup restaurant on the southern coast. She has to date appeared in four of HONG’s features.
In 2010 she also appeared in
IM Sang-soo’s
The Housemaid, a remake of KIM’s film of the same name and thus a spin on her own film debut. Her role of Miss Cho, an older maid in the home, earned her all the major Best Supporting Actress prizes in Korea that year. She attended the Cannes Film Festival for the first time for both
Hahaha and
The Housemaid. She would then return with IM two years later for
The Taste of Money (2012).
Minari may have been her American film debut, but YOUN embarked on her Hollywood career back in 2015, when she appeared on in a supporting role in the Netflix series
Sense8.
Yet the Soon-ja that YOUN will be most remembered for is the one who sows minari seeds in river bed within an Arkansas forest, a role that her saw her blaze through the western awards season. Establishing herself as a favorite early on, she won some three dozen prizes, including the first ever acting awards for a Korean performer at the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Awards, the British Academy Film Awards (BAFTAs) and the Film Independent Spirit Awards, before claiming the Best Supporting Actress prize at the 93rd Academy Awards.
YOUN recently completely another
IM Sang-soo film,
Heaven: To the Land of Happiness - which was selected for Cannes last year and is currently awaiting release, and she will soon meet global audiences again as she is currently filming her second American show, the Apple TV+ series
Pachinko, based on the best-selling novel of the same name.
