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S. Koreans pick Hwang Jung-eum as actor of 2015

December 16, 2015
Hwang Jung-eum (Yonhap)

Hwang Jung-eum (Yonhap)

SEOUL (Yonhap) — Hwang Jung-eum is the actor of 2015, according to a Gallup survey.

The “She Was Pretty” actress received 14.4 percent of the votes in a survey of 1,700 South Korean adults nationwide, Gallup Korea said Wednesday. The poll was conducted from Oct. 29 to Nov. 31.

Hwang debuted as a singer in the girl group Sugar in 2002, but left the group in 2004 to pursue full-time acting. She got her first break in the MBC sitcom “High Kick Through the Roof,” in which she starred as herself.

She drove two MBC soap operas to success in 2015. In the first one, “Kill Me, Heal Me,” she played a first-year psychiatry resident who falls in love with the heir to a family-owned conglomerate. The heir suffers from dissociative personality disorder which is thought to have been caused by childhood trauma.

Her second hit was “She Was Pretty,” in which she played Kim Hye-jin, an unsightly intern at a fashion magazine who used to be pretty as a teenager. At the magazine, she encounters her first love, Ji Sung-joon, who used to be the unattractive one in school.

Actor Kim Soo-hyun and actress Jun Ji-hyun, who played an odd human-alien couple in “My Love from the Star” in 2014, shared second place with 10.4 percent.

This year, Kim took a 180-degree-turn from his stoic alien role in the SBS drama into an awkward rookie producer at a major broadcasting network in “The Producers” on KBS 2TV.

Yoo Ah-in, who currently appears on SBS’ “Six Flying Dragons,” took fourth place with 9.4 percent. Park Seo-jun, who appeared in “Kill Me, Heal Me” and “She Was Pretty” with Hwang, was fifth with 7.9 percent.

The poll was conducted from Oct. 29 to Nov. 31 and it had a margin of error of plus or minus 2.4 percentage points.