---
name: "Yoon Jeong-hee"
canonical: "https://film.one/person/yoon-jeong-hee"
roles: ["Actor"]
born: "30 July 1944"
died: "19 January 2023"
reviewed_on_fi1m: 1
updated: "2026-09-16T13:20:44.599979+00:00"
licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL."
---

# Yoon Jeong-hee

Actor. Born 30 July 1944 in Busan, South Korea. Died 19 January 2023.

## Details

- **Work:** Actor
- **Born:** 30 July 1944, Busan, South Korea
- **Died:** 19 January 2023
- **Also known as:** 윤정희, Yun Jeong-hie, Yun Jung-hee, Yoon Jung-hee, 손미자

## Fi1m on Yoon Jeong-hee

> Yoon Jeong-hee makes uncertainty interesting without asking us to find it charming. Her return in *Poetry* is an excellent performance, alert to the difficulty of learning something new, though the classroom scenes sometimes linger too long.

In the classroom in *Poetry* (2010), Yang Mi-ja is a beginner, and Yoon Jeong-hee allows her to stay one. She does not turn the struggle to write into a promise that something profound is about to be said. We were moved by her persistence in those lessons, because Yoon makes the awkward effort of finding words worth taking seriously. We want to know what Mi-ja is trying to say.

It is a quiet way back into films for someone whose earlier career ran to roughly 300 of them. Yoon became a leading actress after *Theatre of Youth* (1967), working across melodramas, period pieces and other genres. Her films included *Oyster Village* (1972) and *Woman in Crisis* (1987), before *Manmubang* (1994) marked her retirement from the screen. Lee Chang-dong directed her return in *Poetry*, with a role written for her.

Her frequent casting as women with intellectual lives of their own helps explain why Mi-ja feels like a fitting return. The part gives Yoon something to do beyond suffering, and Lee leaves her room to think. Learning to write involves choices and effort; she plays both without making an ordinary difficulty look precious. We can take Mi-ja's curiosity seriously even while she has little confidence in what she is doing.

The restraint works better than some of the film's pacing. The classroom scenes occasionally linger after we have understood how hard Mi-ja is trying, and Yoon's delicacy cannot make every extra minute necessary. Yet she gives us good reason to sit through them: we are watching a woman do work that matters to her, and the performance never makes that work look like an endearing pastime. Start with *Poetry*, and give it an evening without interruptions.

## Biography

Yoon Jeong-hee was a South Korean actress. She debuted in 1967 in *Theatre of Youth* after being selected in a recruit by Hapdong Film and appeared in around 330 films. She was one of the leading actresses of the 1960s, often referred to as part of the "Troika" with Moon Hee and Nam Jeong-im.

She retired in the mid-1990s but returned in 2010 to play Yang Mi-ja in Lee Chang-dong's *Poetry*. For the performance she won multiple best actress awards, including the Asia Pacific Screen Award and the Grand Bell Award.

Yoon married pianist Kun-Woo Paik in 1974. The couple had a daughter who is a violinist. She lived in Paris, France, from the mid-1990s until her death in 2023.

*Sources: en.wikipedia.org.*

## On Fi1m (1)

- *Poetry* (2010), Fi1m 87, as Yang Mi-ja — [page](https://film.one/film/poetry.md)

---
© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/person/yoon-jeong-hee