Shim Eun kyung

Biography

Shim Eun-Kyung (born May 31, 1994) is a South Korean actress. She starred in the box office hits Sunny (2011), Miss Granny (2014), and Fabricated City (2017), as well as the television series Naeil's Cantabile (2014). She has starred in both Korean and Japanese language entertainment. In 2020, she became the first Korean to win Best Actress at the Japanese Academy Awards (Japan's equivalent of the Oscars).

Shim made her acting debut at age 9 in the 2004 TV series The Woman Who Wants to Marry, and subsequently made a career as one of the best child actresses of her generation. She first gained attention for her role as a sexually abused girl in the horror fairytale Hansel and Gretel, and also starred in TV series such as Hwang Jini, The Legend, Women of the Sun, and The Great Merchant; critics say at times she even outshined her adult counterparts.

Shim is the youngest daughter in her family. Her hobbies are listening to music, reading science fiction comics, and doing taekwondo. She is the drummer of a band she formed with friends, Chick and Candy.

After graduating from Eonbuk Elementary School and Cheongdam Middle School, in 2010 Shim temporarily quit acting to move to the U.S., explaining, "I chose a place where there aren’t a lot of Korean people and decided on a high school in Pittsburgh. Studying is a goal, but I also chose this because I've grown tired mentally and physically after having acted since a young age." She finished her high school at the Professional Children's School in 2013.

She shot a commercial with rocker Seo Taiji in 2008 and played the younger version of Lee Ji-ah's character Sujini in The Legend, but she didn't know that Lee and Seo were secretly married until 2011 when Shim was implicated in rumors that she was Seo and Lee's daughter, which she denied.

Originally nominated for the Best Actress award at the 2011 Grand Bell Awards for her role in Sunny, Shim complained publicly through her Twitter account when the awards committee removed her name from the official list of the nominees after she notified them she could not attend the event because she was currently studying in the U.S. 

She was one of four actors and actresses removed from the initial nomination. Shim ended up winning Best Supporting Actress for her role in Romantic Heaven; Chun Woo-hee, her castmate in Sunny, accepted the honor on Shim's behalf