Nollywood actor and director Ramsey Nouah has spoken plainly about the family roots behind his fluent Yoruba and the mixed-race background many fans have long speculated about.S
peaking on IsBae U’s Curiosity Made Me Ask show, the 55-year-old said the language comes naturally because he was raised as a Yoruba boy in Lagos.
“I speak Yoruba so well because I’m a Yoruba boy. I was born and bred in Lagos. My mum is from Ondo, but I’m mixed-race because my father is Lebanese,” he said.
The remark matches the account that has followed him for years. Public biographies place his birth in Lagos on December 19, 1970, to a Lebanese father and a Yoruba mother from Owo in Ondo State. He grew up in Surulere, later studied mass communication at the University of Lagos, and entered acting in the early 1990s.
That path turned him into one of Nollywood’s most recognisable leading men, often tagged the industry’s lover boy. He won the Africa Movie Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role in 2010 for The Figurine. In 2019 he moved behind the camera with his directorial debut, Living in Bondage: Breaking Free, and has directed other titles since.
In the same interview, Nouah also questioned the business case for cinema releases. He argued that only a small share of producers recover what they put in.
“About only two percent of people would probably make their capital invested like ROI on cinemas. Even with the promotion and all of that, some people still do not get the capital they invested,” he said.