Jeon Do-yeon: the Cannes prize, and the quiet that followed

Jeon Do-yeon is in Lee Chang-dong's Possible Love, in a few theaters through Sunday, October 25, and on Netflix on November 6.

She was born in Seoul on February 11, 1973 (Aquarius, Water Ox). She is 53, listed at about 165 cm (5 ft 5 in). Secret Sunshine is the film that carried her outside Korea. In 2007 she became the first Korean to win an acting prize at Cannes.

Before film would cast her

She did not grow up planning on acting. She has called the family ordinary. She studied broadcasting at Seoul Institute of the Arts. A Johnson & Johnson commercial in 1990 got her in the door, and from 1992 she worked in television.

In 1997 she was in Star in My Heart, one of the early Korean dramas shown outside the country. She played a friend from an orphanage, not the lead. The Contact, her first film, came later that year.

Film people were skeptical of a TV actress. She later learned there had been real pushback to casting her in The Contact, her 1997 debut opposite Han Suk-kyu, who was already a movie star. The objection was that she was not a film actor.

She played Soo-hyeon, a woman selling on a home-shopping channel, who starts an online conversation with a radio producer. A Velvet Underground song, "Pale Blue Eyes," is what pulls them toward each other. The film drew about 675,000 admissions and was the second-highest-grossing Korean movie of that year. She won best new actress at the Grand Bell Awards.

She has said the early calm helped. If she had been desperate to make something of herself right away, she thinks she would have burned out.

The prize, and the quiet after it

In You Are My Sunshine (2005) she played a former sex worker who tests positive for HIV. That performance won her a Grand Bell best actress award.

Secret Sunshine is the film that traveled. Lee Chang-dong cast her as Shin-ae, a widow in the city of Miryang who is trying to rebuild a life after she loses her husband and then her son. Song Kang-ho is the man who keeps showing up.

She has said the shoot was painful in a way she only understood later. She kept rejecting the feelings the part asked for, and the doubt made it worse. Lee has said she had never had a child, and still had to play a mother living through that loss, with a harder emotion waiting the next day.

Alain Delon handed her the best actress prize at Cannes in May 2007. It was her first time at a foreign festival. She has said she wanted to hide, because the people around her would not stop talking about it.

She had married that March. Kang Shi-kyu is a businessman who also races cars. The ceremony was private, at the Shilla Hotel in Seoul, on March 11. Their daughter was born in January 2009.

The prize did not flood her with scripts. She has said it was the quietest stretch of her career. People in the industry started treating her as difficult, and the offers thinned.

Her next film was My Dear Enemy (2008), with Ha Jung-woo, already known from The Chaser. She played a woman who spends a day in the car with her ex, trying to get back money she lent him. She remembers the coverage as one question. Why would a Cannes winner take something that small?

The Housemaid (2010) was a different kind of risk. Im Sang-soo's remake of Kim Ki-young's 1960 film put her back in competition at Cannes, as a maid drawn into a rich household, with Lee Jung-jae and Youn Yuh-jung. She started filming about a year after her daughter was born, and she was uneasy about what the part would ask of her body. Afterward she said it freed her, because she had to act with her whole body.

From Birthday to Possible Love

In Birthday (2019) she and Sul Kyung-gu play a couple after the Sewol ferry disaster. Sul has been in Lee Chang-dong's films since Peppermint Candy. Lee produced Birthday. She won best actress at the Baeksang Awards for it.

In 2023 she had a romantic comedy and an action film out in the same season. Crash Course in Romance, on tvN and Netflix, cast her as Nam Haeng-seon, a former national handball player. She runs a banchan shop, selling the side dishes that come with a Korean meal, and she is raising her niece, who calls her mom. Jung Kyung-ho, ten years younger, played the celebrity math tutor across the counter.

Korean headlines asked whether a woman her age could lead a romantic comedy. The finale reached just over 17 percent nationwide, a serious number for a cable channel. She has said the later headlines, the ones that praised her for pulling it off despite her age, did not feel like compliments.

In March, Netflix released Kill Boksoon. Director Byun Sung-hyun wrote her as Gil Bok-soon, an assassin whose teenage daughter thinks she plans events. He has said he built the part by watching how Jeon actually moves through a day as a mother.

Last December, The Price of Confession put her on Netflix again, as Ahn Yoon-soo, a woman accused of murdering her husband, opposite Kim Go-eun, of Little Women.

Possible Love is the return to Lee Chang-dong, his first feature since Burning. She plays Mi-ok, and she took the part because it was him. The scene report has the theaters and the November 6 Netflix date. Venice gave the film the Silver Lion, the Grand Jury Prize.

Lee Byung-hun, her co-star in the 1999 film The Harmonium in My Memory, has said he wonders why it took the rest of the world this long to notice her. She has heard the best-actress talk. A nomination in that category would be a first for a South Korean performer. She has said it was never the goal.

Our take: Secret Sunshine is the performance that explains the prize. Crash Course in Romance is there if you want her running a shop and being funny. Possible Love is the one to see in a theater through Sunday, if a seat is still open.