Reclusive dictator Kim Jong-il kept North Korea at the edge of starvation and collapse, banished to gulags citizens deemed disloyal and turned the country into a nuclear weapons state.
Called the ''Dear Leader'' by his people, Kim, the son of North Korea's founder, remained an unknowable figure. Everything about him was guesswork, from the exact date and place of his birth to the mythologised events of his rise in a country formed by the hasty division of the Korean Peninsula at the end of World War II.
North Koreans heard about him only as their ''peerless leader'' and ''the great successor to the revolutionary cause''.
Yet he fostered what was perhaps the last personality cult in the communist world. His portrait hangs beside that of his father, Kim Il-sung, in every North Korean household and building. Towers, banners and even rock faces across the country bear slogans praising him.
Kim was a source of fascination inside the CIA, which interviewed his mistresses, tried to track his whereabouts and psychoanalysed his motives. And he was an object of parody in US culture.
Short and round, he wore elevator shoes, oversize sunglasses and a bouffant hairdo - a Hollywood stereotype of the wacky post-Cold War dictator. Kim himself was fascinated by film. He orchestrated the kidnapping of an actress and a director, both of them South Koreans, in an effort to build a domestic movie industry. He was said to keep a personal library of 20,000 foreign films, including the complete James Bond series, his favorite. But he rarely saw the outside world, save from the windows of his luxury train, which occasionally took him to China.
He was derided and denounced. President George W. Bush called him a ''pygmy'' and included his country in the ''axis of evil''. Children's books in South Korea depicted him as a red devil with horns and fangs. Yet those who met him were surprised by his serious demeanor and his knowledge of events beyond the hermit kingdom he controlled.
Former South Korean president Roh Moo-hyun, who met Kim in Pyongyang in 2007, said, ''He was a very outspoken person.
''He was the most flexible man in North Korea.''
Although he presided over a country that was starving and broke, he played his one card, his nuclear weapons program, brilliantly, first defying the Bush administration's efforts to push his country over the brink, then exploiting America's distraction with the war in Iraq to harvest enough nuclear fuel from his main nuclear reactor at Yongbyon to produce the fuel for six to eight weapons.
Kim played a weak hand very well. He succeeded in fending off pressure from the US and China, and forcing the US to talk with him and ultimately to haggle with him. He chopped up and dragged out negotiations, holding on to his nuclear fuel and whatever weapons he had produced, giving him a continued source of leverage.
It is that arsenal that now worries US and Asian officials.
Harvard professor and expert on proliferation Graham Allison said, ''When the history of this era is written the scorecard will be Kim 8, Bush 0.''
But a North Korea expert at Kookmin University in Seoul, Andrei Lankov, said if ''he was the greatest master of survival, against all odds, it was his own people who paid the price, and the price was pretty high''.
Kim's songun, or ''army first'' policy lavished the country's scarce resources on the military, at 1.1million-strong the world's fifth largest.
But as the North's economy shrank, its isolation deepened. Possibly as many as two million people - almost 10 per cent of the population - died in a famine in the mid- and late-1990s brought on by incompetence and natural disasters. Once richer than South Korea, the North now has a per-capita national income that is only 5.7 per cent of that of the rival South.
Kim is believed to have been born in Siberia in 1941, when his father was in exile in the Soviet Union. But in North Korea's official accounts, he was born in 1942, in a cabin, Abraham Lincoln-like.
Little is known of his upbringing, apart from the official statement that he graduated in 1964 from Kim Il-sung University, one of the many institutions, buildings and monuments built to commemorate his father. At the time, North Korea was enmeshed in the Cold War, and the younger Kim watched many crises unfold from close up, including North Korea's seizure of the USS Pueblo, a US spy ship, in 1968. He appeared episodically at state events, rarely speaking. When he did, he revealed that he had a high-pitched voice and little of his father's easygoing charisma.
In his youth and middle age there were stories about his playboy lifestyle. There were tales of lavish meals at a time his country was starving - his cook once wrote a book after leaving the country - and his wavy hair and lifted heels, along with a passion for top-label liquor, made him the butt of jokes. Kim campaigned for power relentlessly. He bowed to his father at the front porch each morning and offered to put the shoes on the father's feet long before he was elected to the Politburo, at age 32, in 1974, said Hwang Jang-yop, a former North Korean Workers' Party secretary who had been a key aide for the Kim regime before his defection to South Korea in 1997.
''At an early age, Kim Jong-il mastered the mechanics of power,'' Hwang said. After his health problems in 2008, Kim appointed his third son, Kim Jong-un, who is believed to be in his late 20s, to several key government posts, raising speculation that he would be the successor.
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