YUM Jung-Ah, born in 1972, was first noticed when she won the title of Miss Korea in 1991. Having always dreamed of becoming an actress, she made her first step in the high school drama series <Our Heaven> (1991). She had her first film role the next year in the melodrama <Jazz Bar Hiroshima> (1992). Although she remained extremely active on the smaller screen for most of the 1990s, she made an unexpected sensation with her starring role as an unsettling mother-in...More

YUM Jung-Ah, born in 1972, was first noticed when she won the title of Miss Korea in 1991. Having always dreamed of becoming an actress, she made her first step in the high school drama series <Our Heaven> (1991). She had her first film role the next year in the melodrama <Jazz Bar Hiroshima> (1992). Although she remained extremely active on the smaller screen for most of the 1990s, she made an unexpected sensation with her starring role as an unsettling mother-in-law in <A Tale of Two Sisters> (2003). A turning point in her career, this allowed her to be known as an actress in her own right and to receive more role offers for the big screen, most notable among them in <The Big Swindle> (2004), <Lovely Rivals> (2004) and IM Sang-soo’s <The Old Garden> (2006). Her performance in the latter was highly praised and resulted in her coming back home from the Baeksang Arts Awards with the Best Actress in Film Award. Following her marriage at the end of 2006, she all but disappeared from the public eye, with the exception of a cameo appearance in CHOI Dong-hoon’s blockbuster time traveling period film <Woochi> (2009). She managed to come back on the big screen a few years later, appearing alongside KIM Myung-min as a North Korean spy in <The Spies> (2011), but it was for a role on TV that she made the strongest impression, portraying a notoriously complex character in TV series <Royal Family> (2011). In 2014, she took on a weightier role as one of the leaders of a strike at a supermarket in BOO Ji-young’s acclaimed indie drama <Cart>, therefore subverting her glamorous image. The film bowed at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2014 and earned her the Best Actress in Film Award at the Baeksang Arts Awards, eight years after <The Old Garden>. Although she didn’t have many acting credits in 2018, that year proved to be a highlight in her career, as she starred in the sleeper comedy hit <Intimate Strangers> (2018) and headlined TV drama series <Sky Castle> (2018-2019), a satire of the wealthy that transcended all expectations to become a cultural phenomenon and the biggest success for a Korean series on a cable channel, with a rating of 23.8%. YUM was last seen starring in KIM Yun-seok’s directing debut <Another Child> (2018).Less