Cha Tae-hyun

One film did most of the work. My Sassy Girl was a phenomenon across Asia, and Cha's Kyun-woo, the put-upon boyfriend who absorbs everything thrown at him and keeps turning up, became a template Korean comedies copied for a decade. He was already a singer and a television presence; the film made him a movie star.

His gift is that he is not vain on camera. He will play humiliated, sweaty and wrong-footed for as long as a scene needs it, then turn on real feeling with no visible gear change, which is why the sentimental comedies work on him: Scandal Makers, where a radio host discovers he is a grandfather; Hello Ghost, which begins as slapstick haunting and finishes somewhere else entirely; and Along with the Gods: The Two Worlds, an enormous effects picture that rests on whether you believe a dead man on trial in the afterlife deserves defending.

Television and variety kept him visible when the films were mixed. He was a fixture of 2 Days and 1 Night and remains a regular presence on Running Man and shows like it. Jeon Woo Chi and The Producers gave him drama leads, Police University cast him as a detective turned professor, and Moving used him in a supporting role inside a much larger ensemble. He directed for the first time in 2017 with the variety-drama Hit the Top, in which he also starred.