Olu Jacobs’ family didn’t call him a legend in their statement announcing his passing. They called him the Lion of Lufodo, his son Olusoji Jacobs breaking the news on Instagram this morning alongside his mother, veteran actress Joke Silva. He had turned 84 this past July.
Before Nollywood ever knew his name, British television did. Jacobs trained at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, a school that also produced Anthony Hopkins, and by 1972 he was playing The Boy in “A Taste of Honey” at Sheffield’s newly opened Crucible Theatre. From there, he worked his way onto some of British TV’s biggest shows of the decade: The Goodies, Till Death Us Do Part, The Professionals, The Tomorrow People. He was building a name in Britain long before Nigerians ever saw him on their screens.
A childhood memory in Kano set the whole thing in motion. Jacobs grew up far from his family’s Egba Alake roots in Ogun State, raised instead in northern Nigeria, where he attended Holy Trinity School and threw himself into debate and drama clubs. It was watching Chief Hubert Ogunde perform at Kano’s Colonial Hotel that convinced a young Jacobs that acting wasn’t just a school hobby. It was a calling.
His filmography reads like a masterclass in commanding presence. Across more than 100 Nigerian films, plus international credits like The Dogs of War, Pirates and Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend, Jacobs rarely played ordinary men. Traditional rulers, wealthy patriarchs, politicians, villains, he built a career out of authority, the kind of screen presence younger actors studied rather than simply watched.
Marriage found him relatively late, and it found him for good. Jacobs met Joke Silva at Lagos’ National Theatre in 1981, and the two didn’t marry until 1989. What followed became one of Nigerian entertainment’s most enduring partnerships, on screen and off, eventually growing into the Lufodo Group, a production and distribution company, and the Lufodo Academy of Performing Arts, built specifically to train the next generation of Nigerian actors.
Recognition came from every direction that mattered. The Africa Movie Academy Award for Best Actor in 2007. Nigeria’s national honour of Member of the Order of the Federal Republic in 2011. An Industry Merit Award in 2013. A Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016. Few actors in Nigerian film history collected that full spread of honours.
His final years brought a battle few outside his closest circle knew about. In 2021, after rumours of his death spread online, Jacobs quieted them by showing up at the Africa International Film Festival to accept a Lifetime Achievement Award in person. It was Silva who later revealed, in an interview with Chude Jideonwo, that her husband was living with Lewy body dementia, a detail the public only learned because she chose to share it.
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One line of his kept surfacing in tributes across the industry today, a piece of advice he gave young actors throughout his career: that repetition turns skill into instinct, and the only way to get better at anything is to keep doing it.
Nigeria’s entertainment industry loses one of its true founding fathers today. Its most enduring students will keep passing down what he taught them.
