Photo: Kim Su-mi (right) in Country Diaries, c. 1996. Credit: MBC.
Beloved veteran actress Kim Su-mi 김수미 passed away on October 25 from a diabetic shock. Born Kim Yeong-ok 김영옥 in 1949, she was best known for her 22-year role as the elderly grandmother in Country Diaries 전원일기, South Korea’s longest-running television drama.
After debuting in 1970, Kim spent the first decade of her acting career playing bit parts in various TV dramas from MBC 문화방송, one of South Korea’s three television stations at the time. Her breakout role was as Il-yong’s Mother 일용엄니 in Country Diaries, an MBC weekly drama that ran for 1,088 episodes from 1980 to 2002 and is considered one of South Korea’s greatest TV series. (The Simpsons, the longest-running American TV series, has 772 episodes as of this writing.) Depicting the story of two farmer families in bucolic (and fictitious) Yangchon-li 양촌리 village, Country Diaries became a massive hit at a time when most TV shows focused on the lives of hip, glamorous urban characters.
Kim’s role as the matriarch of the Lee family speaks to her genius as an actor. She was only 30 years old when she first took on the role of a grandmother in her mid-60s - younger, in fact, than Park Eun-su 박은수, the actor who played her son Lee Il-yong 이일용. Initially intended as a bit part, Kim Su-mi’s performance of “Il-yong’s Mother” as a straight-talking, nosy old woman that one might see in every small town pushed her character to a recurring role. In the process, Country Diaries, initially conceived as a miniseries, became a multi-season juggernaut.
Kim’s career also reflects the injustices that South Korean actresses suffered in the 1980s. Kim Hye-ja 김혜자, who played the matriarch of the Kim family of Yangchon-li village in Country Diaries, lamented that if her co-star had been born in a different time or a different country, she would have had more opportunities to show her range as an actress, rather than playing the role of a grandmother for 22 years. Kim Su-mi at one point refused to film the series for three months, as she hated the idea of spending the prime of her acting career best known as an old woman in her 70s.
After Country Diaries ended in 2002, Kim continued acting in movies and musicals, and launched a successful catering company. Her passing surprised her fans, as she had appeared in public as recently as in September.
