Youn Yuh-jung was born in Kaesong, Gyeonggi Province, on June 19, 1947, and raised in Seoul. Her father passed away when she was a child. She is the youngest of two mothers. Her sister, Youn Yeo-soon, is a former LG Group executive.
When she passed the TBC open auditions in 1966, she was a freshman at Hanyang University majoring in Korean Language and Literature. In 1967, she dropped out of college and made her acting debut in Mister Gong, a television drama. Youn rose to fame in 1971 after two memorable roles as femme Fatales. Her first film, Kim Ki Young’s Woman of Fire, was a critical and commercial success, earning her the Sitges Film Festival’s Best Actress award.
She then starred as the titular notorious royal concubine in the MBC historical drama Jang Hui-bin. In collaborations with Kim, such as The Insect Woman (1972) and Be a Wicked Woman (1973), Youn did not shy away from playing risque, provocative roles that explore the grotesque in the female psyche (1990). Audiences enjoyed Youn’s quick wit and outlandish style, and she often appeared in TV dramas portraying modern women of the new generation, such as Kim Soo Hyun’s Stepmother (1972).
Youn retired from acting in 1974 after marrying singer Jo Young Nam, and later immigrated to the United States. She returned to Korea in 1984 and resumed her acting career permanently. In 1987, she and Jo split.
It was an unusual feat for a Korean middle-aged actress to make such a strong comeback after such a long absence. Although most actresses her age played clichéd self-sacrificing mothers or coarse ahjummas, Youn’s acting range allowed her to be cast in more nuanced roles glamorous, and independent. She received critical praise for her nonchalant portrayal of a mother-in-law who abandoned her dying husband and engaged in extramarital affairs in A Good Lawyer’s Wife (2003). In E J-Yong’s mockumentary Actresses, her frank and optimistic demeanor reappeared (2009).
Youn continued to appear in supporting roles in films and television, most notably in The Housemaid, where she stole the show (2010). In The Taste of Money (2012), she reunited with director Im Sang-soo for the fourth time, playing a ruthless chaebol heiress at the core of the drama that unfolds and touches on themes of exploitation, greed, and sex. “I don’t mind being called an old actress,” Youn said, “but I’m concerned about how to continue acting without looking like an old fool.”
In Song Hae Sung’s Boomerang Family, she played a caring mother to three loser children in 2013. Youn’s mainstream success was resurrected later that year after she starred in her first reality show, Sisters Over Flowers, a travel show filmed in Croatia.
In 2015, Youn starred in two leading roles: Salut d’Amour, a film about a relationship between an elderly supermarket employee and a flower shop owner, and Canola, a film about a Jeju Island female diver who reunites with her long-lost granddaughter, both directed by Kang Je-gyu.
She appeared in the American film Minari in 2020, for which she won over forty American regional critics awards, including the National Board of Review and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.
WATCH THE TRAILER OF “MINARI” HERE:
She received the Screen Actors Guild Award and the BAFTA Award, making her the category’s oldest recipient and the first success in the Korean language to do so. She also earned nominations for the Critics’ Choice Awards and the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, making her the first Korean actress to do so.
YOUN YUH JUN IN OSCAR AWARDS:
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