Yu Oh-seong

Yu Oh-seong (Korean: 유오성; born September 11, 1966) is a South Korean actor. He is best known for his roles in Beat (1997), Attack the Gas Station (1999), Friend (2001) and Champion (2002).

Yu Oh-seong made his stage debut in 1992, and throughout the mid-1990s, he complemented a career in television with minor roles in film. With his success playing a young gangster in the hit movie Beat (1997), Yu's face became familiar to a new generation of moviegoers. The year 1999 was somewhat of a breakthrough for Yu, as he took the lead role in Jang Jin's acclaimed cult comedy, The Spy and also starred in Kim Sang-jin's hugely successful Attack the Gas Station.

His career reached its peak in 2001. Appearing as Jang Dong-gun's co-star in Kwak Kyung-taek's smash hit Friend, which sold an unprecedented 8 million tickets, Yu won effusive critical praise for his hard-edged performance as a ruthless gangster and enjoyed a tremendous degree of exposure.

This fame would carry over somewhat when he took the lead in director Kwak's fourth feature Champion, a 1980s-set biopic of boxer Kim Deuk-gu, who dominated the Korean boxing scene until his death after the World Boxing Association lightweight championship in 1982. However, even though Yu was praised for his body makeover and acting skills, the film failed to deliver on the high expectations that preceded it. Later that year, a series of highly public disagreements with Kwak, believed to stem from money problems, made headlines and served to cool some of the public's interest in the actor.

Yu's next two films, the melodrama Star with actress Park Jin-hee and the patriotic/historical drama Thomas An Jung-geun about the titular independence activist, bombed badly at the box office.

He returned to television in 2004, headlining his first historical drama series (sageuk) Jang Gil-san. Set in the Joseon period during the reign of King Sukjong, Jang Gil-san was born of a female servant, raised by gypsies, then rises politically.

For the contemporary drama Invisible Man in 2006, he played a man in his thirties battling early-onset Alzheimer's disease with the support of his loving family (his wife is played by Chae Shi-ra). Yu said his character Choi Jang-soo was closest to his real-life personality. This was followed by a leading role in adultery drama Dear Lover (2007) with Yoon Son-ha, a remake of 1995 Japanese drama Koibito Yo.

In 2009, Yu and Song Seon-mi played a gangster and doctor who fall in love in the stage play Turn Around and Leave, which was previously dramatized onscreen in the 1998 film A Promise and the 2006 TV series Lovers. Later that year, he played a supporting role in Potato Symphony, about a man who moves back to his hometown with his daughter, and faces unresolved conflicts with his old high school friends (the protagonist is played by Jeon Yong-taek, who also wrote, directed and produced the film). Jeon and Yu are close friends in real life, and the film is set in their hometown Yeongwol County. Despite winning the Grand Prix at the 4th Festival Franco-Coréen du Film, Potato Symphony was little seen domestically.