Youn Yuh-jung has made history by becoming the first South Korean actress to be nominated for Academy Award.
She was nominated on Monday in the Best Supporting Actor category for her role in drama Minari, which follows a Korean-American family as they move to an Arkansas farm.
Congratulations to the Supporting Actress nominees! #OscarNoms pic.twitter.com/HNZ6uCpaQA
— The Academy (@TheAcademy) March 15, 2021
Yuh-jung is already a legend in the Korean acting space, as she's starred in many of Korea's most revered films and TV series over the course of her five-decade career.
She's won many awards over the years, including Korea's Blue Dragon Film Award for Best Actress in her film debut in 1971's Women of Fire.
While she took a break from acting to move to the US, she returned to Korea a decade later, earning accolades from her turns in films such as The Taste of Money and A Good Lawyer's Wife.
She's also popular for her sense of style in her home country.
Minari, which already won the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture – Foreign Language, was nominated for four Oscars on Monday, including Best Original Screenplay and Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role for Korean-American actor Steven Yeun, which made him the first Asian-American Best Actor nominee in the awards show's history.
The Korean-language movie is hoping to follow in the footsteps of last year's Best Picture winner Parasite, which became the first film in a foreign language to win the award.
Yet the two films could not be more different, as Parasite is a dark satire about class and contemporary society in South Korea, while Minari is a tender, quintessentially American story about an immigrant family in the 1980s trying to better themselves.
It was also conceived, produced and filmed in the US, unlike Parasite.
Other actresses nominated in the same category at this year's Oscars are Maria Bakalova for Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, Glenn Close for Hillbilly Elegy, Olivia Colman for The Father and Amanda Seyfried for Mank.
