A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS

OJI ONOKO recalls an encounter with the iconic actor, Olu Jacobs, few years ago

This Monday evening as the car drops you in front of his Ikeja, Lagos home, you are not so hopeful of meeting him. It is a deadline and your heart pounds as you press the door-bell. “Good gracious, he’s in,” you mutter. He smiles as he offers you a seat in his sparsely furnished sitting room, lighting a cigarette…

He could have been a reputable medical doctor if he had pursued that line of study. The immaculate white lab coats of medical doctors tickled his childhood fancy. The pious aura of the Catholic priests also attracted him. He did all he could to get into the Seminary. It was close to what he wanted. The priests in their hoods and cassocks stood on moral high ground. Men quaked before them. Women in all humility appeared before them to “spill” their sins and seek forgiveness. He liked the calling but besides the fact that he never heard the “call,” it was not exactly what he wanted. “It was close but not quite,” he said. 

Then legendary theatre practitioner, Hubert Ogunde came to Kano where he was living with his parents who took him to watch the performance. Enthralled, he knew that was what he wanted – to entertain people. He was still in elementary school but his mind was made up. “He just took my breath away,” he recalled. “I knew immediately that that was how I wanted to reach people. How I wanted to communicate with people….” 

When the opportunity to travel to England came, he did not hesitate to opt for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA). There, he was taken through the entire gamut of theatre training by experts in different fields including his major interest – acting. 

He wanted to take to the stage as soon as he completed the course. “But in England you cannot get a job as an actor unless you are a member of the union. On the other hand, nobody will give you a union card unless you have a job. And to get a job, you need an agent and no agent takes you without you being a member of the union,” he explained of the Catch-22 situation he found himself.

    Caught in this web, it was the BBC that gave him a break. The broadcasting station had an open house since it did not pay as high as the independent television stations and the theatre companies. Subsequently he worked in different Repertory theatres. It was hard and exacting work. “In the Repertory theatres you do nothing but play all the year round, one after the other. You would be playing one and rehearsing for another. In one week, you could have three shows,” he explained. 

  The plays took him to Manchester, Birmingham, Coventry, Leeds and Shepherd Hills. In many of the theatres, he was the first black face the audiences were seeing on stage. He had to muster his will power to suppress the overwhelming atmosphere of prejudice. What gave him joy was that people appreciated his acting, drawing from the Nigerian heritage to steady himself. “It’s good to be a Nigerian no matter how bad things are,” he said. “Our culture is rich, strong and powerful. And once you understand your culture and proud about it, nothing can depress you, at least not for long,” he enthused. 

 It was not long before he played in London’s West end, the city’s ultimate theatre Mecca. Soon enough, he was admitted as a life-long member of the National Theatre of Great Britain. He did a lot of television series and TV Specials including the famous children’s programme Jacknary. “Anybody who knows about Jacknary would tell you that only a few actors ever got cast in it,” he said.

But Olu Jacobs entered the big league when he started appearing on celluloid films. He was in Baby, a Walt Disney Pictures that took him to Ivory Coast, Blue Screaming, which took him to Hollywood in the United States where he rubbed shoulders with the big stars and the film version of Fredrick Forsyth’s Dogs of War, shot in Belize, a former British colony, located in the eastern coast of Central America. There was Ashanti in which he played alongside acting greats like Michael Cain, William Golding and Omar Sheriff and Pirates, an MGM film that was shot in Tunisia, Malta and France.

He spent 21 years in England enjoying the limelight with the best actors on the theatre, TV and film. It was a jolly good ride. He was comfortable and jobs came to him easily and regularly. But he always thought about home. Actually he never stopped thinking of his home country, Nigeria. He wanted to touch his own people the same way he had touched lives abroad. FESTAC’77 he thought would be a good platform to work his way home but it did not work out.

In the 1980s he began to frequent Nigeria with a view to settling down. What he saw in the theatre environment did not impress him. But he kept trying the waters, staying longer each time he visited. By 1984, he was fully back in Nigeria and floated LUFODO Productions to have a modicum of control of his productions. That same year, Peter Igho of NTA invited him and his wife (Joke Sylva) to take part in a TV series Second Chance. He took part in other TV series including Third Eye. In 1986, he produced a stage play Holychild under LUFODO productions which became an annual affair every December followed by Digging for Gold among others…

He was very active in the video film industry [now called Nollywood] featuring in English and sometimes Yoruba films with equal ease and comportment. He saw himself as an entertainer who would render his servicers as an actor to any producer if he liked the script.

 His last take on acting as you stepped out of his house that day still echoes in your ears: “Acting is being.” 

Excerpts from Onoko’s book, Glimpses of Our Stars (Published 1999)