Song Ji-hyo

Song Ji-hyo was a magazine cover model before she was an actress, a route into Korean entertainment that usually leads nowhere. Hers led to Wishing Stairs (2003), the third Whispering Corridors film, where the horror is generated almost entirely by teenage girls watching each other in corridors. Television followed in 2006 with two shows at once: the palace romantic comedy Princess Hours and the historical epic Jumong.

She is a better dramatic actress than her international profile suggests, and the reason for the gap is Running Man. Since 2010 she has been a fixture of the variety show, where the persona (blunt, competitive, entirely unbothered by dignity) is strong enough to colour everything else she does. It made her famous across Asia and it flattened her, the way variety fame flattens people: audiences arrive at her dramas expecting the version they know from the games.

The films argue otherwise. A Frozen Flower cast her as a queen in a court where she has almost no room to move, and she plays the constraint rather than the tragedy. New World dropped her into a gangster picture dominated by men. Emergency Couple and My Wife's Having an Affair This Week let her do comedy with real bruises in it. Keeping both careers running is the harder path, since variety demands a fixed persona and drama demands you keep dissolving it.