HE employed a personal sushi chef to prepare raw fish so fresh that it was still flapping, had an insatiable appetite for foreign films and fine wines and would have women kidnapped for his pleasure. He also liked nuclear weapons.
Kim Jong-il's youngest son and most likely heir, Kim Jong-un, reportedly had plastic surgery to give him the same chubby cheeks, double chin and mouth as his well-fed grandfather, Kim Il-sung, the godfather of North Korea.His middle son, Kim Jong-chul, is said to be too feminine to be a strong leader and his eldest son, Kim Jong-nam, was apparently banished by his despot dad after he was sprung outside the communist nation, visiting Disneyland in Japan on a false passport using a Chinese alias Pang Xiong, meaning "fat bear".
When North Korea's Dear Leader, the chain-smoking Kim Jong-il, 69, died on Saturday of exhaustion brought on by a sudden illness while on a domestic train trip, he left a country in despair - and his ruthless family to fight it out to succeed him.
"The next three years will be very hard for them," said Dr Leonid Petrov, the North Korean expert at the University of Sydney.
Kim Jong-il relied on the cult of personality and military power and kept his nation shut off from the outside world to protect his regime. His official biography has his birth in 1942 marked by a new star and a double rainbow at Mount Paekdu, a sacred site to Koreans. But it is more likely he was born in a guerrilla camp in Russia, while his father was fighting the Japanese who had colonised the Korean peninsula.
At least initially, the head of the rogue state will be the anointed one, Kim Jong-un.
The 28-year-old who transformed himself from a slim young man into the reincarnation of his grandfather, was born in January 1984.
He studied at the English-language International School of Berne in Switzerland until the age of 14 using a pseudonym and is thought to speak English and German.
His late mother was a Japanese-born ethnic Korean dancer Ko Yong-hi but there is a dispute as to whether she was Kim Jong-il's official wife or mistress at the time. Kim Jong-il's former personal sushi chef from 1988 to 2001, who has used the name Kenji Fujimoto since fleeing to Japan in fear of his life, has revealed tantalising details of the family's luxurious lifestyle.
Kim Jong-un is "exactly like his father", Mr Fujimoto has said. "If power is to be handed over then Jong-un is the best for it. He has superb physical gifts, is a big drinker and never admits defeat."
He got the chef's job because Kim Jong-il had a passion for fugu, the flesh of the Japanese puffer fish of which the tiniest bite can be deadly but which is the most highly valued sushi. It has to be sliced by specially licensed chefs to avoid the deadly poison that accumulates in its organs.
Kim Jong-il "enjoyed raw fish so fresh that he could start eating as its mouth is still gasping and the tail is still thrashing. I sliced the fish so as not to puncture the vital organs, so of course it was still moving. He would eat with gusto", Mr Fujimoto said.
He added to the enigma of Kim Jong-il, describing him as a lonely man who contemplated suicide after the 1994 death of his father but also as a monster, a man whose volatility and short temper could be terrifying. But while Mr Fujimoto said the diminutive leader, who wore platform shoes to make him seem taller than his 1.5m, liked cruel jokes, he was a skilled politician who kept major global powers on edge with his nuclear posturing.
While there are few televisions in North Korea, there is a tightly-controlled national TV network.
But Kim Jong-il's passion is movies - he had at least 20,000 films on video or DVD.
Yet the nation that can enrich uranium to make nuclear bombs still has no national electricity grid.
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