Kim Hye-soo

She also won Best New Actress for Kambo at 23rd Baeksang Arts Awards.

Kim Hye-soo (Korean pronuncation: [kim.he.su]; born September 5, 1970) is a South Korean actress.

Kim Hye-soo was born on September 5, 1970, in Busan, Dongnae District, the second of five children.

She moved to Seoul Midong Elementary School while she was in third grade at Busan National Elementary School due to her father's work.

Kim was one of the most popular teen stars in the 1980s and 1990s.

She is known for her headstrong independence and regularly playing strong-willed, sophisticated women.

Kim is referred to as a "Pencil Board Star" of the 1980s due to the popularity of pencil boards printed with her image.

While in elementary school, she was a member of the national Taekwondo children's demonstration team, and in April 1982 was the flower girl to present a bouquet to Juan Antonio Samaranch, the seventh President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

Kim began her career in an advertisement for Nestlé Milo in 1985.

In 1985, Kim featured in a commercial for Nestlé Milo and as well as the first K-pop music video, Cho Yong-pil's title song Empty In The Air.

She made her film debut as a leading actress in the film Kambo (1986), for which she received her first accolade as Best New Actress at 1987 Baeksang Arts Awards.

In 1986, Kim made her film debut on Kambo when she was a first-year high school student.

Kim went on to play the leading roles in the television series Samogok (1987), Sun Shim-yi (1988), and Senoya (1989).

She co-starred with Roh Joo-hyun in When The Flowers Bloom And The Birds Cry (1990).

She has also been named a part of the "Troika of the 1990s" in Korea along with her contemporaries Kim Hee-sun and Shim Eun-ha for their nationwide fame.

In 1991, she landed the main role in Lost Love.

She was the youngest winner of the Blue Dragon Film Award for Best Leading Actress in First Love (1993).

In 1993, Kim led the main role in the film First Love and gained critical acclaim for her portrayal of the archetypal innocent girl, winning a Blue Dragon Film Award for Best Leading Actress and earning her the title "Nation's First Love" although the film was a box-office failure.

Aside from her performances in films, Kim has appeared in many successful television series, including Partner (1994-1998), Did We Really Love? (1999), Royal Story: Jang Hui-bin (2002), The Queen of Office (2013), Signal (2016), Hyena (2020), Juvenile Justice (2022), and Under the Queen's Umbrella (2022).

Over two decades, she amassed a sizeable filmography of leading and supporting roles, notably in the television series Did We Really Love? with Bae Yong-joon and Revenge and Passion with Ahn Jae-wook, as well as the film Tie a Yellow Ribbon (1998).

In the 2000s, Kim focused more on her career in film rather than television, featuring in Kick the Moon, YMCA Baseball Team and Three.

At this time, she reinvented her image as a glamorous and confident femme fatale in Hypnotized (2004),

Kim's roles in The Red Shoes (2005) and Tazza: The High Rollers (2006) were her most recognised and ushered her into the highest ranks of the Korean film industry A-list.

Her most commercially successful role was Madam Jeong in the crime film Tazza: The High Rollers (2006), which also won her third Blue Dragon Film Award for Best Actress.

Various film roles followed, such as a housewife secretly dating a college student in A Good Day to Have an Affair; a non-plussed aunt in Shim's Family; a prostitute in Eleventh Mom and a bar singer in Modern Boy (2008).

In 2009, Kim returned to television with Style, which was set in the fashion industry.

She considers her collaboration with Han Suk-kyu in 2010's Villain and Widow as one of the highlights of her acting career.

She followed that with the mystery melodrama Home Sweet Home in 2010.

W with Kim Hye-soo premiered in July 2010, but was cancelled in October 2010, with Kim criticizing the network's decision.

In 2012, she reunited with Tazza director Choi Dong-hoon in The Thieves.

Set amongst the casinos of Macau, the heist film became one of the highest-grossing films in Korean cinema history.

Kim won the Award for Best Actress in a Film at the 20th Korean Culture and Entertainment Awards This was followed with a supporting role in Han Jae-rim's historical film The Face Reader.

In 2013, she headlined the romantic comedy The Queen of Office (also known as Goddess of the Workplace), an adaptation of the 2007 Japanese drama Haken no Hinkaku ("Pride of the Temp").

A frequent host of film awards ceremonies and TV variety shows, Kim became a host of MBC current affairs show W in 2015.

Kim, an avid documentary fan, was considered a perfect it for the programme as it shifted its' focus more to environmental and global issues.

Kim next starred in Coin Locker Girl (also known as Chinatown) in 2015, the rare female-driven noir film.

She said she didn't mind looking unattractive for her role as a ruthless crime boss, with makeup artists adding age spots to her face, gray to her hair, and flab to her stomach and hips with prostheses.

Kim said it was "mentally agonizing" deciding whether to accept the role, but once she did, she felt "a surge of excitement" every time she stepped onto the set, and considered the film "a new challenge that (made her) heart race and (scared her) at the same time."

Kim made her small-screen comeback in 2016 with tvN's Signal, which was both critically and commercially successful.

Kim as Cha Soo-hyun, acted opposite Lee Je-hoon and Cho Jin-woong as the first female police officer in the Special Task Force, later becoming the leader of the Seoul Cold Case Aquad.