Cinema and the Media Create Movie Stars

A Book Review of Azuh Amatus's Famous Faces: Interactions with Nollywood Stars and Stakeholders

 

Cinema creates movie stars—i.e., individuals who, through the masterly interpretations of their make-belief roles on the screen, enjoy a stellar level of admiration from the audience. Nollywood – the cinema of Nigeria and the second largest film industry in the world – parades such individuals in cosmic proportions. 

    Without doubt, Nigerian cinema had been engaged in the enterprise of creating movie stars before the advent of Nollywood. Actors like Adeyemi “Ade Love” Afolayan, Moses “Baba Sala” Adejumo, and Herbert “Osetura” Ogunde, for instance, gained prominence in the mid 1970s from Ola Rotimi’s Ajani Ogun (1976). 

     However, it is Nollywood’s pioneer movie, Living in Bondage (1992), that revolutionized the star culture of the Nigerian cinema, with its sleek Hollywood-style, full-color jacket. The glossy sleeve had the faces of the film’s key characters emblazoned on it. 

     Although some of the actors (like Francis Agu, Bob-Manuel Udokwu, and Kanayo O. Kanayo) were already popular on television, Living in Bondage launched them, and the myriad others who have come after them, into the stratosphere of stardom.