Once popular talk show host, comedian Suh Se-won dies at 67

Suh Se-won, a famous South Korean comedian and once a top talk show host from the 1980s to the early 2000s, died Thursday of an illness in Cambodia, where he had been undergoing treatment, sources familiar with the matter said. He was 67.

Suh died at a Korean hospital in Phnom Penh around 11 a.m. (local time), the sources said. Suh had apparently been suffering from diabetes.

Suh debuted in 1979 after winning a comedy contest hosted by a TV broadcasting station. As he developed his career over the years, Suh found his talent in emceeing talk shows rather than playing parts as a comedian.

Suh hosted a number of talk shows on major TV stations, before launching the “Suh Se-won Show,” a talk show under his own name that aired from 1996-2002 and put him at the top of his career.

The Suh Se-won Show is regarded as a TV program that opened an era for a talk-based entertainment format that invited top celebrities to the stage for chats.

In the early 2000s, Suh became a film producer and took part in the production of the action-comedy “My Wife Is a Gangster.”

His career took a downfall after he got involved in an array of corruption and stock manipulation cases after the mid-2000s.

Suh received a suspended jail term in 2006 for bribery and tax evasion charges. In the years that followed, Suh was found guilty in a separate stock manipulation case.

Suh chose to take a religious path and was ordained as a pastor in 2012, serving at a local church.

But Suh went out of the limelight after he was found to have long been beating his then wife, celebrity Suh Chung-hee, after footage of him hitting her violently was released to the public in 2014.

He received a six-month prison term, suspended two years, in 2015 and divorced his wife that year. Suh Se-won remarried a traditional instrument player the following year and moved to Cambodia.