Youn and Soji Arai in Pachinko.
Photo: Juhan Noh/Apple TV
Following Minari, she starred in several more Hollywood productions, including Apple TV’s Pachinko, 2025’s The Wedding Banquet, and, most recently, the second season of Netflix’s Beef, playing Chairwoman Park, the billionaire owner of a country club.
Youn’s acting career began incidentally. While enrolled at Seoul’s Hanyang University in the 1960s, she was looking for a part-time job to help pay for tuition when, while visiting a television station, she was asked if she could hand out prizes to the audience of a children’s game show.
“I said, ‘Okay, I’ll do it.’ And I did,” she says. “And then they gave me the check. I was surprised, so I kept going.”
Then, one day, a producer at the TV station invited her to audition for an acting job. “You know, my major was Korean literature,” Youn says, explaining that the TV network had tried but failed to attract any film school students. “My life is full of surprises.”
After appearing in a few TV series, she made her feature film debut in her early 20s, playing a live-in housemaid who wreaks havoc on a middle-class family in Kim Ki-young’s 1971 thriller Woman of Fire. The role catapulted her to national stardom, earning her several domestic and international acting awards. Around the same time, she portrayed another femme fatale character in the historical TV drama Jang Hee Bin, further cementing her popularity.
Then, in 1974, at the height of her early fame, she married Jo Young-nam, a famous Korean singer who was invited by the late evangelist Billy Graham to perform at his crusades across the US. Youn put her thriving acting career on hold and followed Jo to Florida, where he enrolled at the Trinity College of Florida and she became a housewife and, later, a mother to their two sons.
