Bae Yong-joon

Bae Yong-joon has dated music video director Lee Sa-kang and has also been linked with Koo So-hee.

Actress Park Soo-jin finally became the one he accepted as his lifelong partner and the couple got engaged in May 2015 and got married just two months later. The event was a private affair which took place in presence of only very close friends and family members. The couple welcomed a son in October 2016.

Bae Yong-joon was born in the Mapo District in the city of Seoul on August 29, 1972 into a very humble family. He had an artistic side since his early years. Since he was quite good in academics, his parents were never worried about the future of their son. While being indulged in literature and performing arts, he was also good in sports and the academics.

His interest in acting peaked around his later high school days and once he was out of school, he started auditioning for roles.

The confidence he carried about his acting skills quickly got him his very first acting role in ‘Salut D’Amour’, a South Korean romance drama, where Bae played a college student. That was in 1994, and it was no small deal to shine in the very first acting project.

More offers followed thereafter and in the next year, he appeared in a leading role in the super successful short lived drama series ‘Sunny Days of Youth’. It was just his second acting assignment and he won several award nominations that year and bagged the Best New Actor honour at the KBS Drama Awards.

The next few years came with several lead roles in the television. He had mixed results as some of his shows worked, while there were a few that didn’t. Some of them such as ‘Papa’ and ‘First Love’, got record viewership numbers. The 1999 series ‘Did We Really Love?’, further established him as a fine young actor and the series was also highly regarded by the critics as the best drama of the year.

In 2002 came the drama series ‘Winter Sonata’ which not only did wonders in South Korean, but also played a major part in making Korean shows popular abroad as well. It was about love, heartbreak and compassion and became a pan-Asian success in more than 20 countries, especially in Japan, where people went crazy over Bae, and he was now getting termed as Emperor Yon, a Japanese term implying a very high level of respect.

Bae had a very brief film career by then as he had previously appeared in two small feature films back in the 90’s, but in 2003 came the film ‘Untold Scandal’, where he played a sexually perverted anti-hero. The film went on to become a massive success and Bae’s performance was honored at that year’s Baeksang Arts Awards and Korea Film Awards.