Lee Min Ho and Park Min Young (SportsKorea)

Korean star couple Lee Min Ho and Park Min Young seemed to have parted ways.

K-drama fans will recall that the twosome met and started dating while shooting "City Hunter" six months ago. Although many of Lee Min Ho's fans were dismayed by the "unavailable" status of their favorite star, most have learned to be happy for him. After today's news, it looks like the hot actor is single once again.
Park Min Young's agency revealed that the couple have parted ways for a while now. Park's agency expressed that due to Lee Min Ho and Park Min Young's busy schedules, they had very limited time to spend with each other causing their relationship to fall apart. Park's agency further revealed that the couple broke up even before the 2011 acting award shows which explains why the stars attended two different award ceremonies separately.

No official word from Lee Min Ho's agency has been released. Stay tuned for more updates.

Source : yahoo.com

Via Dramabeans.com
By girlfriday

The production team behind highly anticipated miniseries The King has announced that Ha Ji-won and Lee Seung-gi have been confirmed as the soon-to-be royal couple to hit the small screen this March. Looks like the king’s in for a noona romance, but considering that Seung-gi’s basically the poster boy for noona love, it only seems fitting.


The King is the new project from the team behind Beethoven Virus (PD Lee Jae-kyu and writers Hong Jin-ah and Hong Ja-ram), and is described as both a romantic comedy and a “human melo black comedy.” Uh… so basically you have no idea what it is. If it’s actually a dark comedy, all the better, but I’m not going to get my hopes up about that. The story takes place in a fantasy world where modern-day South Korea is governed by a constitutional monarchy. Lee Seung-gi will play the crown prince, Lee Jae-ha, who is just the face of the royal family. He quite literally only has a handsome face and cares nothing about politics, and is described as horribly spoiled and materialistic, and extremely blunt.

Meanwhile, Ha Ji-won plays Kim Hang-ah, a legendary North Korean special forces agent, now an instructor for the special forces. They begin their unlikely romance with prejudices about each other, but eventually come to fall in love.

The King follows The Moon That Embraces the Sun and premieres March 14 on MBC.

Read the whole article from its original source @ dramabeans.com
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Having come into overwhelming mainstream popularity just as his mandatory military service approaches,

By Bae Ji-sook
Staff Reporter

Four out of every 10 actors here have been suffering from depression and have had suicidal urges from time to time, according to a degree paper by actress Park Jin-hee, Tuesday.

About 20 percent have actually purchased toxic agents or "devices" for suicide, she revealed, claiming that the extreme stress to stay attractive and to remain in the limelight drives them to mental instability and leads them to make drastic choices.

For her masters degree paper for Yonsei University, "Studies on Depression and Suicidal Urges Among Actors", Park, who has played leading roles in numerous movies and TV dramas, interviewed 260 actors last year with incomes ranging from 10 million won-per-episode to less than 1 million won a month.

She found that 40 percent were suffering from depression.

Respondents were quoted as saying, "I am sick of being alive. I want to die" and "I want to commit suicide and have often thought about going through with it". About 20 percent of them actually bought pills or other harmful devices to kill themselves and another 20 percent said that they have confessed to others about their urges.

Park said most of these symptoms derive from their "unstable status" in life. They thought their employment status was too rocky and that their talents weren't received well enough by the public and industry insiders.

The gap between the general public's perception that entertainers "live flamboyant and happy lives" and their actual life being "not so glamorous" also caused them mental anguish.

They were often forced to hide their real characters or feelings from others to remain "likable" and some of them thought "having to stay young and blissful" was self-consuming.

Their stress index marked 53.12 out 100, which is higher than that of self-employed men at 48.12 and salaried workers, at 48.18.

Park's report is expected to create a whirlwind in the showbiz world recently reeling from many celebrities committing suicide and the possible copycat syndrome among their fans.

Actresses Lee Eun-joo, Jeong-Da-bin, Choi Jin-sil; actor Choi Jin-young and pop singer Yuni are just some of the well-known celebrities who have taken their own lives of late.

After the suicide by the late actress Choi Jin-sil in October 2008, the number of suicides jumped by 60 percent compared to the previous year, according to Statistics Korea.

"The numbers show that people, who seem to be in the middle of amiability, love and glamour, are some of the most lonesome and troubled", Park said in the paper.
Courtesy of Hancinema.net
http://www.hancinema.net/-40-percent-of-actors-considered-suicide--22957.html