Kim jong il biography bbc

Those who met him say he was well-informed and he was said to have followed assiduously international events.

Some saw him as a clever manipulator, willing to take risks to underpin his regime.

Former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said that Kim Jong-il was "very much on top of his brief".

His image in North Korea was one of a hero in the typical manner of the dictator's cult of personality.

Official North Korean accounts say he was born in a log cabin and the event was reportedly marked by a double rainbow and a bright star in the sky.

They say he wrote six operas in two years and designed one of Pyongyang's most famous landmarks.

In fact, according to outside experts, Mr Kim was born near the Russian city of Khabarovsk where his guerrilla father was receiving Soviet military support.

Subsequently, the young Kim spent the Korean War in China.

Like most of North Korea's elite, he graduated from Kim Il-sung University.

In 1975, he acquired the title Dear Leader and five years later joined the Central Committee of the Korean Workers Party and was given special responsibility for art and culture.

In 1978, he ordered the abduction of a South Korean film director, Shin Sang-ok and his actress wife Choi Eun-hee.

They were held separately for five years before being reunited at a party banquet.

Kim was also said to have been a fan of Ealing comedies, inspired by their emphasis on team spirit and a mobilised proletariat.

Former US Secretary of State Madeline Albright also gleaned a direct insight into the Korean cineaste's habits during a state visit in 2000.

According to the New York Times, external, Kim asked Albright if she had seen any recent films.

When she replied "Gladiator", Kim said he had seen Steven Spielberg's Amistad, which he described as "very sad".

He also told Wendy Sherman, who was in Pyongyang as a special advisor: "I own all the Academy Award movies. I've watched them all."

But Kim was less than enamoured by Hollywood's portrayal of his own regime.

When his beloved James Bond was captured and tortured during a North Korean mission in Die Another Day, the government called it "insulting to the Korean nation".

But most scathing of all was Trey Parker and Matt Stone's Team America: World Police, in which a marionette of Kim Jong-il with a crudely-impersonated Korean accent sits at a piano singing: "I'm so ronrery [lonely]."

This parody of a vain and isolated leader is, to many Westerners, the presiding impression of Kim Jong-il.

Indeed, Team America became a trending topic on Twitter within hours of his death being announced.

Kim may not have approved of the caricature. But he would certainly have appreciated cinema's power to shape people's minds.

The announcer, wearing black, struggled to keep back the tears as she said he had died of physical and mental over-work.

The KCNA later reported that he had died of a "severe myocardial infarction along with a heart attack" at 08:30 local time on Saturday (23:30 GMT Friday).

He had been on a train at the time, for one of his "field guidance" tours, KCNA said.

The state news agency said a funeral would be held in Pyongyang on 28 December and Kim Jong-un would head the funeral committee. A period of national mourning has been declared from 17 to 29 December.

Images from inside the secretive state showed people in the streets of Pyongyang weeping at the news of his death.

Ruling party members in one North Korean county were shown by state TV banging tables and crying out loud, the AFP news agency reports.

"I can't believe it," a party member named as Kang Tae-Ho was quoted as saying. "How can he go like this? What are we supposed to do?"

Another, Hong Sun-Ok, said: "He tried so hard to make our lives much better and he just left like this."

KCNA said people were "convulsing with pain and despair" at their loss, but would unite behind his successor Kim Jong-un.

"We will look up to the respected Comrade Kim Jong-un as we pledged to do so in front of you," said Lee Jin-Hyang, a worker at the Pyongyang Textile Factory, addressing Kim Jong-il's remains.

Pak Chol Yong, a soldier, was quoted by the state news agency as saying: "We will devotedly safeguard Gen Kim Jong-un with arms, closely rallied as one in mind around him."

Photographs released by North Korean state media showed solemn gatherings in halls and opens spaces in Pyongyang.

At least some of the mass wailing and weeping on the streets of Pyongyang is an expression of genuine grief, our correspondent says.

Rafael Wober, a journalist with the Associated Press, one of the few foreign media organisations to be given access to Pyongyang, described the moment news of the death broke on Monday:

"Well, the announcement came as a complete surprise. I went out, I could see immediately in the corridors hotel staff crying, in the restaurant and the shop downstairs, hotel staff in tears, sobbing."

One defector who now lives in Seoul remembered similar scenes in 1994, following the death of the country's founder, Kim Il-sung, and was suspicious of the emotions on display.

"You couldn't not cry in public so people used to pinch themselves to make themselves cry," he said.