Nollywood is still absorbing the death of Oludotun Baiyewu Jacobs. He died on September 16, 2026, at 84, after a career that stretched from a Kano school stage to British television, Hollywood sets and the founding years of Nigerian film.
Here are seven things to know about the legendary Lion of Lufodo.
1. Early Life
Jacobs was born on July 11, 1942, and spent his childhood in Kano. His parents came from the Egba Alake community of Abeokuta, Ogun State. At Holy Trinity School he joined the debating and drama societies, the first stages where that deep voice learned to hold a room. The spark that turned school plays into a vocation came from Chief Hubert Ogunde. After watching one of Ogunde’s concert parties at the Colonial Hotel in Kano, the boy decided acting would be a profession, not a pastime.
2. Education
He left Nigeria for London and trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, one of the world’s most demanding drama schools. That classical grounding later separated him from many of his Nollywood peers. He learned control, diction and presence the hard way, then carried that discipline home.
3. Early Career
Britain knew him first. In the 1970s he worked repertoire theatre and appeared on television in The Goodies, Till Death Us Do Part, Barlow at Large, The Venturers, Angels, The Tomorrow People and The Professionals. In 1972 he played The Boy in A Taste of Honey at Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre. In 1978 he took the role of President Mageeba in a presentation of Tom Stoppard’s Night and Day. Long before Nigerian audiences called him uncle, British stages had already tested him.
4. International Breakthrough
Film followed. His international credits included Ashanti (1979), The Dogs of War (1980), Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend (1985) and Roman Polanski’s Pirates (1986). Those sets gave him a global finish he later poured into local palace roles. When he returned to Nigeria around 1990, he stepped into NTA’s detective series The Third Eye as Inspector Best Idafa and began the second act that would define him at home.
5. Nollywood Legacy
He went on to appear in well over 100 Nigerian films, often as fathers, chiefs, traditional rulers and political power brokers. Oloibiri, Dry, The Royal Hibiscus Hotel, Adesuwa and Heroes & Zeros used the same weapon: stillness, timing and a voice that made authority feel ancestral. Alongside contemporaries such as Pete Edochie, he helped give early Nollywood its gravity. Kings on screen borrowed his posture. Younger actors studied his pauses.
6. Marriage and Lufodo
His union with veteran actress Joke Silva became one of the industry’s longest public partnerships and a working company. Together they built the Lufodo Group, covering production, distribution and the Lufodo Academy of Performing Arts. Jacobs refused to swallow her brand. In later years she also became the public guardian of his dignity after disclosing that he was living with Lewy body dementia.
7. Honours and Farewell
The prizes arrived in sequence. He won the Africa Movie Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role in 2007 for Dancing Heart, received the AMVCA Industry Merit Award in 2013, collected a lifetime achievement honour in 2016, and was conferred Member of the Order of the Federal Republic in 2011. When his son Olusoji announced the passing, the family reached for gratitude, not spectacle.