The beloved national actor Ahn Sung-ki, for whom cinema was life itself, passed away on the 5th. He made his debut at the age of five with Twilight Train (1957) and went on to lead some of the most iconic works in Korean film history, including Whale Hunting (1984), the Two Cops series, Taebaek Mountains (1994), Chihwaseon (2002), and Silmido (2003). He was a towering star of Chungmuro.
According to his agency, Artist Company, Ahn collapsed at his home on the afternoon of the 30th of last month after choking on food. He received CPR and was transported to the emergency room at Soonchunhyang University Hospital in Yongsan-gu, Seoul, but ultimately did not recover. He was 74.
He had battled blood cancer for several years. His final screen appearance was in Noryang: Deadly Sea (2023), in which he portrayed Eo Yeong-dam, a figure who assisted Admiral Yi Sun-sin.
Ahn Sung-ki lived his entire life on film. The deep creases that formed when he smiled, and his gaze—at once playful and solitary—were his trademarks. According to the Korean Film Archive, he appeared in roughly 180 films.
Born in Daegu in 1952 amid the upheaval of the Korean War, he spent his school years in Seoul. The person who led him into acting was his father, Ahn Hwa-young. When director Kim Ki-young, a friend of the family, said he needed a child actor for Twilight Train, Ahn’s father brought his youngest son of three—marking the beginning of “actor Ahn Sung-ki.”
The boy, known for his strikingly large eyes, later won a special juvenile acting award at the San Francisco International Film Festival for his portrayal of a pickpocket in Kim Ki-young’s A Teenager’s Rebellion (1959). It was the first time a Korean actor received an acting award at an overseas film festival. He also appeared at the age of eight in Kim Ki-young’s masterpiece The Housemaid (1960).
As roles for teenagers dwindled, he entered a hiatus. In his third year of middle school, after appearing on the National Theater stage in the play The Surplus Human alongside revered senior actors such as Lee Soon-jae, Kim Seong-ok, and Jang Min-ho, he stepped away from child acting. The years he spent away from the entertainment industry later became a foundation for his nuanced portrayals of ordinary people.
While attending Dongsung High School, he intended to participate in the Vietnam War and enrolled in the Vietnamese Department at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, joining the ROTC. But the war ended. After completing his service, he returned to the film industry and won the Grand Bell Award for Best New Actor in 1980 for his role as Deok-bae, an awkward Chinese restaurant deliveryman, in A Good Windy Day (directed by Lee Jang-ho).
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| One of the most iconic scenes from No Mercy(1999)—the film in which Ahn Sung-ki appeared—features a brutal fight in the rain between a hired killer (played by Ahn) and a detective, the two trading punches at close range. This scene was later echoed in The Matrix, starring Keanu Reeves, which is widely regarded as having drawn inspiration from it. |
He rose to become one of Chungmuro’s defining stars by fearlessly taking on films that captured the anxieties of their time. With works such as A Small Ball Launched by a Dwarf (1981) by director Lee Won-se, Mandala (1981) and Taebaek Mountains (1994) by director Im Kwon-taek, and White Badge (1992) by director Jung Ji-young, he swept major honors including the Grand Bell Awards and the Baeksang Arts Awards, while also winning broad public affection.
Over the years, he portrayed an extraordinary range of characters: a man yearning for the American Dream (Deep Blue Night), a crazed baseball coach (Lee Jang-ho’s Baseball Team of Outsiders), an ill-fated house painter (Chilsu and Mansu), a timid salaryman (Men Are Tormented), and an exorcist priest (Toemarok and The Divine Fury), among many others.
Ahn Sung-ki was an actor who could embody both the “ordinary” and the “extraordinary.” With his signature naturalistic style, he gave depth and texture to Korean realism and socially conscious cinema.
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