The actor, who died Thursday at 87, won over generations of viewers as the star of two of Korea's longest-running dramas
It is not common for an actor to serve as a touchstone for his country through decades of change. Choi Bul-am was one of the few who did.
From the days of black-and-white broadcasts to the streaming era, Choi, who died Thursday at 87, played tough men with soft hearts in whom South Korean viewers saw themselves and their own fathers. His unhurried way of talking and head-thrown-back laugh were so well known across the country that they made for a running gag in their own right.
Choi started out onstage in 1959, but the theater brought him little recognition. He moved to television in 1967, at 28, and took whatever parts came his way. His first was an elderly general in a period drama, which set him on a path of playing older parts for much of his career.
Choi broke through with "Chief Inspector," a weekly crime drama on the local broadcaster MBC that ran for 880 episodes from 1971 to 1989. He played Inspector Park, the tireless, careworn head of a detective squad who would never let up until he got his man. With his beige trench coat and a cigarette always in hand, the character became the country's template for TV detectives, something like a Korean Columbo.
Many episodes drew on real-life cases, and the culprits were often portrayed with sympathy as people left behind by the breakneck growth of the 1970s and ’80s. Hugely popular in its day, the show got a prequel in 2024, “Chief Detective 1958,” starring Lee Je-hoon (“Taxi Driver,” “Signal”) as a young Inspector Park.
If “Chief Inspector” made Choi a national star, “Country Diaries” made him feel like family to millions of viewers. Set in a small farming village, the sprawling series aired 1,088 episodes from 1980 to 2002 and remains the longest-running TV drama in South Korean history. Choi led an ensemble of some of the country’s most beloved actors, including Go Doo-shim, Kim Soo-mi and Yoon Yeo-jung, as the patriarch of the household at the center of the story.
As the series followed the lives of rural Koreans through two decades of change, Choi came to define the Korean father for a generation of viewers. His character was a gruff, old-fashioned man of the house whose word was law to his family, yet compassionate and big-hearted enough to take in an orphan and raise him as his own.
The role also reunited Choi with his frequent screen partner Kim Hye-ja, best known abroad for Bong Joon-ho’s “Mother,” who played his wife; many viewers took the two for a real-life couple.
The two shows were such big hits that by the early 1990s, Choi had found an unexpected kind of fame as the punch line of a whole genre of jokes, known as the Choi Bul-am series, which spread by word of mouth and spawned numerous joke books. Most of them had him as a naive man who was easily fooled and given to oddball replies. Choi said he disliked the jokes at first but later came to enjoy them.
After a brief stint in politics in the mid-1990s, Choi started taking parts that went against his upright, fatherly persona. In “You and I” (1997-98), a weekend family drama that caught on during the Asian financial crisis, he played a brash, ne’er-do-well old sailor who kept making trouble for his grown children. He went further still in the 2004 comedy film “Sympathy for Us,” clowning around alongside fellow veterans Oh Ji-myung and Noh Joo-hyun.
Choi largely stepped away from acting in the 2010s, with his last regular role in a TV series coming in 2014. Even as his screen roles grew scarce, Choi remained a familiar face as the host of “Korean Cuisine and Dining,” a documentary series that has aired since 2011. The show took him to rural towns all over the country, where he sat down with locals to share their home cooking and hear their life stories. He stayed on until April of last year, when he left to recover from back surgery.
For his final screen appearance, Choi showed up in the opening and closing episodes of "Chief Detective 1958" as the legendary inspector in the present day, now an old man walking with a cane.
The series closes with the old detective visiting the graves of his former squad and greeting each one of them by name. By then, Choi had outlived his co-stars from the original show; having stayed close to them for decades, he came up with the words on the spot.
“I missed them so badly that the words just came out before I knew it,” Choi said in a 2024 interview. “Now I've got to tell them everything I wanted to say.”
moonkihoon@heraldcorp.com
