South Korean actress Choi Jin-sil has been found dead at her Seoul home in an apparent suicide, police have said.
The 40-year-old is believed to have hanged herself after she was found with an elastic band around her neck tied to a shower stall in her bathroom.
No formal suicide note was found, but the actress Tunnel misery ...
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Choi was one of South Korea's most popular actresses.
"It's obviously suicide," Yang Jae-ho, chief investigator at Seoul's Seocho police station told reporters, citing a doctor's examination of Choi's body and evidence from family members and friends.
He said an investigation was under way.
Her death comes a month after the suicide of a fellow actor, Ahn Jae-hwan, who was rumoured to have owed her a large amount of money.
Choi denied the claims and asked police to investigate who had been circulating the stories.
The actress's mother told police that she returned home drunk on Wednesday night, crying and denying the rumours, before going into the bathroom, Mr Yang said.
The investigator also said a friend of Choi's told police the actress had worried about raising her children after her divorce from baseball star Cho Sung-min in 2004, and often said she wanted to die.
The actress had reportedly taken medication for depression since then.
Choi, nicknamed "the nation's actress", made her debut in the late 1980s.
She starred in a number of box-office hits, including the 1990 film My Love, My Bride and 1994's How to Top My Wife.
Choi had been preparing for a second series of TV drama The Last Scandal of My Life, in which she played a woman who found love with a top actor after a painful divorce.
(BBC)
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