Lee Min Ja

Born in Seoul in 1929, she dropped out of Muhak Girls’ Middle School. She began her acting career in 1944 when she joined the theatre company Modern Theatre. In the same year, she starred in Choi In Gyu’s ‘Children of the Sun’ as a minor role, and in 1948 she was selected as the lead role in Ahn Jin Sang’s ‘The Dawn’, and she made her face known to the film industry.
She met Kim Jin Gyu when she was 17 years old. She married him in 1945, but she divorced him 14 years later. After the Korean War, she took over acting as a widow. In Korea’s first female director Park Nam Ok’s ‘The Widow ‘(1955), she played the protagonist ‘Lee Shin Ja’ in the post-war widow’s reality. She performed well for her role as a falling widow and won the 6th Buil Film Awards for Best Actress.
She emigrated and left her numerous scandals and her flashy entertainment world behind and she moved to Japan in 1968 and she married again. She even ran her club “Minja” in Tokyo, and in 1986, she died of a stroke at the age of 57 at the University of Tokyo Hospital in Japan.
(Source: KMDb)