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Cha In-ha Becomes Third Young Korean Entertainer to Die in Two Months

The 27-year-old actor appears in a TV series that premiered just last week.

Cha In-ha at an event for the show “Love With Flaws” in Seoul, South Korea, in August.Credit...Yonhap News/Newscom, via ZUMA Press

A Korean actor, Cha In-ha, has been found dead at the age of 27, according to a talent agency that represented him. Mr. Cha, who was set to appear in the new TV series “Love With Flaws,” is the third young Korean entertainer to die in less than two months.

“We’re sincerely hurt that we’re sending this sad news to the people who have given Cha In-ha so much love and supported him until now,” a representative from Fantagio, an entertainment agency, said in a statement Tuesday, according to the Korean daily newspaper Hankook Ilbo.

Fantagio cautioned against speculating about the circumstances of his death.

It was not immediately clear what had killed Mr. Cha or where he had been found, as of early Wednesday in Seoul.

Mr. Cha, whose real name is Lee Jae-ho according to Variety, has been gathering fans as a member of the acting group SURPRISE U since 2017. Fantagio handpicked the five young men to sing, act, dance and generally dazzle people, according to an entertainment site, which reported on their debut.

Snagging a role in “Love With Flaws,” a romantic comedy with a prominent time spot on a major Korean TV station, promised to introduce him to a broader audience. His initial performance on the show, which premiered last week, as a bartender at a gay bar inspired the Korean pop site Kpopmap to credit him with “melting hearts.”

As reports of his death spread, thousands of fans posted comments on Instagram on Tuesday under pictures of Mr. Cha. “It’s a shame that we lost another soul in 2019,” one wrote.

The news about Mr. Cha arrived on the heels of the recent deaths of two prominent female K-pop stars. Sulli, 25, and Goo Hara, 28, ended their lives within six weeks of each other in October and November, exposing the painful side of being a K-pop idol.

“Their fall can be as sudden and as dramatic as their rise to the height of fame,” Lee Hark-joon, a South Korean journalist, who has produced a documentary and written a book about the Korean music industry, recently told The New York Times after Ms. Goo was found dead in her home in Seoul. “Theirs is a profession especially vulnerable to psychological distress — they are scrutinized on social media around the clock, and fake news about their private lives is spread instantly.”

Choe Sang-Hun contributed reporting from Seoul.

Heather Murphy is a general assignment reporter who often writes about advances in DNA technology. More about Heather Murphy

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