Veteran Yoruba actress, Madam Grace Owoola Oyin-Adejobi, popularly called Iya Osogbo, has said age has denied her the opportunity to venture into the business of acting again.
In addition, she also spoke for the first time about the day an excited fan nearly ran her into a gutter with her Jeep on her way to the office of one of her children in Ibadan, the Oyo State capital.
Oyin-Adejobi said this experience has remained indelible in her memory because her thought was that the day was going to be her last on planet earth, except in the end it did not turn out as she feared initially.
She said: “The fan eventually came down from her car to let me know that she merely wanted to exchange greetings with me. “She later enveloped N10,000 and dashed me.”
Iya Osogbo, who was the wife of the late versatile actor in the Yoruba genre, Chief Oyin Adejobi, made these revelations while featuring on a radio magazine programme on Space 90.1fm, Parrot Xtra Hour on Radio, anchored by Olayinka Agboola in Ibadan.
The veteran actress said she started her acting career some 67 years ago and she also mentioned that she had already made her name before she acted in the film titled: “Eran Iya Osogbo,” thereby correcting the erroneous belief her admirers had held before now.
She said unlike now when acting has become not only the in-thing and profitable, in her time, parents frowned at people, especially women, who ventured into the profession as they were generally regarded as unserious and therefore wayward.
Madam Oyin-Adejobi expressed her displeasure over the near-nudity being practiced by actresses in Nigeria, advising them not to be deceived by the pleasures of the world, but to believe that they can succeed through dint of hard work and the grace of God.On how she met her late husband, Oyin Adejobi, who died in 2000, she said both of them went to the same school and were also living on the same street, adding that right from the start of his career, he was never under a boss.
She said that apart from the death of her husband, the lowest point for her life was when her fourth child, a female, died, adding: “It took me a long time to recover from that experience.”
However, her happiest moment was when she gave birth to her first child, a boy. in 1954.
Iya Osogbo went further to say that whenever their theatre group went to stage plays or was showing a film in a cinema house, she was the one who used to sell ticket unmindful of what some miscreants might do “as I know that they all love me.”
She said it was at Jebba that “we raised the gate fee of our shows to 20 kobo, which had a lot of value, unlike what obtains nowadays where the value of money is nothing to write home about”.
She used the opportunity to admonish younger generation of Nigerians on the need to work hard and be focused.
Her words: “I got to attain this age because of God’s mercy.
