🇰🇷 Bae Yong-joon

He was born on August 29, 1972, in Seoul, the elder of two brothers. He was a quiet teenager, fond of photography, with the gentle, slightly diffident bearing that would become his trademark. He had wanted to be a director. His professors at Sungkyunkwan University, where he studied film, urged him in front of the camera instead; he debuted at 22 in the KBS family drama Love's Greetings (1994), and within a year was a fixture of Korean primetime, his glasses-and-cardigan look quietly out of step with the bouffant masculinity of the era.

First Love (1996-1997), a 66-episode KBS2 melodrama, drew an average rating of 52.7 percent and finished with one episode at 65.8 — figures that, in a country with three terrestrial broadcasters, meant something close to the entire viewing nation. Hotelier (2001) followed, and then, in January 2002, came Winter Sonata. Conceived by writer Yoon Eun-kyung and director Yoon Seok-ho as the second installment of an Endless Love seasonal quartet, the show was a 20-episode tearjerker about high-school sweethearts separated by amnesia, snow, and the implausible coincidences that Korean writers handle better than anyone.

Domestically it was a hit. Then, in April 2003, NHK's satellite channel BS2 began airing it in Japan with subtitles. By April 2004 — when NHK promoted it to its main terrestrial channel — Winter Sonata had become a cultural event of a kind Japan had not experienced since the Beatles. Middle-aged women, the so-called oba-san demographic that the country's media had spent decades ignoring, began organizing pilgrimages to the show's Nami Island shooting location. They called Bae 'Yonsama' — adding the highest honorific normally reserved for emperors. He was awarded an honorary citizenship of Tokyo's Setagaya Ward.

Untold East Asia is where most actors would have stayed. Bae took a different route: he made fewer things, but bigger ones. The historical epic film Untold Scandal (2003), a Korean transposition of Dangerous Liaisons, won him Baeksang Best Actor. The Production Company he co-founded, KEYEAST, became a powerhouse with stakes in DramaFever and a roster that would later include Kim Soo-hyun. The 2007 animated series The Legend, in which he voiced and starred as a Goguryeo king, drew an estimated US$ 80 million in pre-sales — at the time, the highest figure in Korean television history.

He semi-retired from acting after that, citing exhaustion and recurring back problems aggravated by a chronic spinal disc condition. He surfaced periodically — a 2009 photo book on Korean traditional crafts, Journey in Search of Korea's Beauty, which sold improbably well; a quiet wedding in 2015 to the actress Park Soo-jin; the founding of KEYEAST's content arm and his eventual sale of his majority stake to SM Entertainment in 2018, a transaction that confirmed what the industry already understood, which is that he had become, almost inadvertently, one of Korea's wealthiest entertainment-industry figures.

He has not appeared on screen in years. His sons — there are now two — are growing up out of the public eye. In Tokyo, the Yonsama fan clubs still meet. They are older now; some of them have brought their grandchildren. They watch Winter Sonata on Blu-ray. The wire-rim glasses, which he keeps in a drawer somewhere in Seoul, helped launch a 30-billion-dollar industry. He has, by every available indication, made his peace with that.

When the history of Hallyu is finally written, it will have many heroes — BTS, Bong Joon-ho, the unnamed Netflix executive who greenlit Squid Game — but its origin chapter will belong to a quiet man in a long coat, smiling shyly at three thousand Japanese women on a Tokyo runway, holding a bouquet he did not quite know what to do with.