Kim Hye-ja

Kim Hye-ja is a South Korean humanitarian and actress. Kim is best known to South Korean audiences as the archetypal mother figure in popular television series such as Country Diaries, What Is Love?, My Mother's Sea, and Roses and Beansprouts, but she received international critical acclaim for her performance in the 2009 noir thriller, Mother. She also received critical acclaim in 2019 for her performance in The Light in Your Eyes.

Despite winning Best Actress at the Manila International Film Festival in 1983 for Late Autumn and occasionally appearing in stage plays and musicals, Kim Hye-ja spent the majority of her career on television. She is the only person to have won the Daesang ("Grand Prize", or highest award) at the MBC Drama Awards three times in 1988, 1992, and 1999. Kim is the first and only person to have won the Daesang at the Baeksang Arts Awards four times in 1979, 1989, 2009, and 2019.