Two years have passed since beloved South Korean actress Kim Soo-mi died on October 25, 2024, at the age of 75. South Korean outlets TV Report and Herald Muse both marked the second anniversary on October 25, remembering an actress whose career spanned more than five decades and whose absence is still felt across television and film.
Kim died of hyperglycemic shock leading to cardiac arrest, according to both reports. Her blood sugar rose sharply, causing her bodily functions to decline, Herald Muse reported. The sudden news shocked the entertainment industry and audiences alike, with colleagues and viewers sharing tributes in the days that followed.
Her most famous role came early and lasted for decades. Beginning in 1980, Kim played Il-yong’s mother in MBC’s long-running drama ‘Country Diaries,’ a role she held for 22 years. She took on the part in her early thirties, yet made the character so convincing that she became known nationwide as a national actress. The role earned her the MBC Acting Grand Prize in 1986 and anchored a career that moved easily between television and film.
On screen, Kim was known for bold, unfiltered comic performances, including roles in films such as ‘Mapado,’ and she won the Blue Dragon Film Award for Best Supporting Actress in 2011, according to TV Report. Later in her career she found a new audience through variety television, cooking side dishes herself on tvN’s ‘Soomi’s Side Dishes’ and warmly welcoming guests as the host of KBS’s ‘Soomi’s Mountain Cabin.’ Until September 2024, just a month before her death, she was still appearing on tvN STORY’s ‘Chairman’s People,’ reuniting with her ‘Country Diaries’ colleagues.
Her final film reached audiences after her death. ‘Ghost Police,’ released in January last year, co-starred Shin Hyun-joon, whom Kim treated like a son. Ahead of the release, Shin recalled that Kim had wanted them to make a warm, cute family film, telling him that they were a family movie and should not push it too far toward comedy. He said he was glad that her last work was a film that could make many people laugh.
The anniversary has also brought a personal tribute from her family. Actress Seo Hyo-rim, who married Kim’s son Jung Myung-ho in December 2019 and has one daughter with him, has taken over Kim’s kimchi business. Herald Muse reported that Seo announced on social media ahead of the anniversary that kimchi would launch timed to October 25, writing that to her, kimchi is her mother, that thinking of her mother brings kimchi to mind, and that she will keep moving forward step by step as if her mother is always by her side.
Herald Muse also noted the harder side of Kim’s final years, reporting that she had suffered stress over unpaid appearance fees and a dispute involving a food company that sold products under her name, and that a diary published after her death described deep anguish over her work and those conflicts. Those details, attributed to the diary and to reports at the time, add a sobering note to the anniversary: behind the warm public image was an actress who carried significant burdens in her later years.
Kim began her career as a third-generation open-recruitment talent at MBC in the early 1970s, and over the following decades she became a fixture of Korean living rooms, first as a young woman playing a mother, later as a grandmother figure, a comic scene-stealer, and a warm variety host. Two years after her death, the tributes from outlets, colleagues, and family suggest that her place in Korean popular culture has not faded. The kimchi launch timed to her anniversary is a fitting symbol of that legacy: a taste and a craft she shared on screen, now carried on by the family she left behind.
