Born in 1965 to a single mother, Oh Min-ae had a difficult childhood, having to drop out of high school in order to start earning money for her family. Although she didn’t know anything about acting, one day, while she was planning for a backpack trip to India, a travel agent filling up a form asked her about her occupation and assumed she was a stage actor. As innocuous as it might seem, this wrong guess led her to actually wonder if she wasn’t made for an acting career,...More

Born in 1965 to a single mother, Oh Min-ae had a difficult childhood, having to drop out of high school in order to start earning money for her family. Although she didn’t know anything about acting, one day, while she was planning for a backpack trip to India, a travel agent filling up a form asked her about her occupation and assumed she was a stage actor. As innocuous as it might seem, this wrong guess led her to actually wonder if she wasn’t made for an acting career, and, immediately charmed by the freedom with which actors could express themselves on stage, she decided to give it a try. Soon after her first film appearance in <Memento Mori> (1999), she decided to do a meditation retreat at a temple for a year and an half before returning on stage, this time performing under the name of Oh Ju-hee.
When she got married and became a mother, she resumed her studies, while her work in theater leant more and more on the administrative side. Before she knew it, she found herself doing some menial office job at a credit card company. Just when she was starting to fall into depression, her duties as the head of a theater association suddenly brought her back on stage on the occasion of a new production they were putting on. Her rekindled delight while rehearsing was all she needed to convince her to quit her job and dedicate herself to her acting career in earnest. Even then, her screen roles were still limited to bit parts, such as in <Boomerang Family> (2013), <The Running Actress> (2017), <THE OUTLAWS> (2017).
With the MeToo movement shaking Korea’s theater industry hard in 2018, Oh decided to seek out more roles in films in order to avoid the deleterious working environment that had already cost her several severed relationships with colleagues. Her participation in the short <To Each Your Sarah> (2019), for which she won a Jury’s Special Award at the Mise-en-scene Short Film Festival, put her on the map of many rookie directors, just at a time when she was considering give up acting altogether and open a kimbap restaurant. As a result, her work dramatically increased in 2021, with more than 20 credits that year alone, mostly in short films, and she picked up Best Actor at the Jeonju International Film Festival for <Missing Yoon> (2020), her first lead role in a feature film.
She could also be seen on television in drama series such as <Mister Sunshine> (2018) and <Penthouse> (2020-2021).
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