Kam Woo-sung
South Korean actor
Kam Woo-sung (born October 1, 1970) is a South Korean actor. He is best known for his portrayal of a court jester serving a despotic king in the hit period film The King and the Clown.
Career
Kam Woo-sung majored in Oriental painting at the Seoul National University, then made his acting debut in the 1991 television drama Our Paradise. Through his roles on TV in the following decade, Kam became known for playing gentle and intellectual upper-middle-class men, notably in Hyun-jung, I Love You. Then in 2002, he successfully subverted this image in his first film, the critically acclaimed Marriage Is a Crazy Thing, in which he played a commitment-phobic professor having a passionate affair.
More characters followed in a variety of genres: a man trapped in a confusing and haunting sequence of events in Song Il-gon's mystery film Spider Forest; the PTSD-afflicted leader of a South Korean squadron in Vietnam who looks into the mysterious disappearance of 18 soldiers in the horror thriller R-Point; and a son struggling to fake Korea's reunification to fulfill an ailing father's wish in the comedy A Bold Family.
In late 2005, Kam reached a turning point in his 15-year career when he starred in The King and the Clown. Jang Hyuk was originally cast in the leading role of a court jester during the reign of Joseon dynasty tyrant King Yeonsan, but after Jang was implicated in a draft-dodging scandal, Kam was brought in to replace him. He trained extensively over two months in the art of Korean traditional performance, including street opera, and acrobatic, rope and mask dances. The low-budget film unexpectedly broke box office records to become (at the time) the highest grossing Korean film of all time.
The public source identifies “Kam Woo-sung” as south Korean actor. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Woo-sung, South and Korean.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 14, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q626102. VIAF identifies the subject as 95039362. The Library of Congress control number is no2006132209. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1970, 1991, 2002 and 2005.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kam Woo-sung” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.