FACTBOX: A look at North Korean leader Kim Jong-il

(Reuters) - North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, vilified by the West as a temperamental tyrant with a nuclear arsenal and deified by his propaganda machine as a peerless military genius, may have fallen seriously ill.

The following are five facts about Kim, many of which have been embellished by his state's official media to build a cult of personality:

* BIRTH

February 16, 1942. Western reports suggest Kim was born at an army camp in the Soviet Union where his father was a key figure among Korean communist exiles receiving training. The North's propaganda says Kim was born in a secret guerrilla camp at Mount Paektu, a peak considered sacred to Koreans. Kim Jong-il's younger brother mysteriously drowns in 1947.

* EARLY YEARS

Kim is mostly educated in China and later attends Kim Il-sung University -- named after his father -- in Pyongyang. He joins the ruling Korean Workers' Party upon graduation and quickly rises in its ranks. By 1969, he is a member of its Politburo and deputy director of the Propaganda and Agitation Department.

North Korea's official biography said that in elementary school, Kim showed his revolutionary spirit by leading marches to battlefields where Korean rebels fought against Japanese occupiers of the peninsula.

* ANOINTED SUCCESSOR

Kim Il-sung names his son as his successor in 1974. Kim Jong-il, now referred to as the "Dear Leader" in state media, steadily increases his power in domestic, international and security affairs in the 1980s.

Intelligence experts say Kim ordered the 1983 bombing in the capital of Burma, now Myanmar, that killed 17 senior South Korean officials and the bombing of a Korean Air jetliner in 1987 that killed 115.

Kim is also suspected of devising plans to raise cash by kidnapping Japanese, dealing drugs through North Korean embassies and counterfeiting currency.

* POWER SHIFT

Takes power in 1994 when his father dies at age of 82. Jong-il assumes title of grand secretary of the Workers' Party and chairman of the National Defence Commission, but does not take title as president. "Great Leader" Kim Il-sung is named eternal president.

* THE NORTH'S LEADER

Analysts said it took Kim about two years to solidify his rule after his father died. In his early years at the top, the North battles a famine that killed an estimated 1 million of the country's 23 million people. The economy falters under Kim and is smaller now than it was 20 years ago. Meanwhile, Kim steps up the country's nuclear and missile programs.

(Reporting by Jon Herskovitz; Editing by Jonathan Thatcher and Jerry Norton)