Kim Hee-sun - Career

Career

Kim Hee-sun debuted as the MC of SBS's music show Inkigayo in 1993 during her second year of high school, and has since become famous both at home and abroad as one of Korea's most beautiful actresses. She starred as the heroine in many hit trendy dramas in the 1990s, such as Propose and Forever Yours with Ryu Shi-won, Wedding Dress with Lee Seung-yeon, Mister Q with Kim Min-jong and Song Yun-ah, Tomato with Kim Suk-hoon, and Goodbye My Love with Ahn Jae-wook.

Kim also gradually built up a career in film, beginning in 1997 with Repechage opposite Jang Dong-gun. Director Lee Kwang-hoon subsequently put her in his next film, Ghost in Love in 1999. In her most high-profile role to date, Kim played the daughter of a Mongolian general in the big-budget martial arts fantasy Bichunmoo, shot in China and released in the summer of 2000. Although criticized for her acting in the film, it gave her more local and international exposure than any of her other films. Along with her popular TV dramas, it cemented her position as a Korean wave star in mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and throughout Southeast Asia.

In late 2001, Kim took on a completely different kind of role, cutting her hair short and starring as an animator in Wanee & Junah. Although her acting in this film drew a favorable response from critics, the film itself was a flop at the box office. In 2003 her career took a bit of a downturn, when the environmentally-themed melodrama A Man Who Went to Mars (also known as A Letter From Mars), in which she starred with Shin Ha-kyun, proved to be an utter bomb at the box office. She returned to television in 2005, playing a blind woman in Sad Love Story, which received low ratings. But thanks to her popularity among Chinese viewers, she was then cast opposite Jackie Chan in The Myth, for which she learned to speak Mandarin.

After her 2006 drama Smile Again, Kim got married in 2007, and she left the entertainment scene to devote her time to being a wife and mother. During this five-year hiatus from acting, she only appeared in magazines, and in 2009 she published Kim Hee-sun's Happy Mom Project, a book on childcare and how to lose post-pregnancy weight.

Though she appeared in the 2011 Chinese epic The Warring States, Kim officially made her comeback as a modern-day doctor who time-travels to Goryeo in the 2012 period romance Faith.