Veteran Nigerian actor Olu Jacobs died on Wednesday, September 16, 2026, at the age of 84, closing out a career that spanned more than five decades across British theatre, Hollywood, and Nollywood. His death was confirmed in a joint family statement shared by his wife, veteran actress Joke Silva, and their son, Olusoji “Soji” Jacobs, who wrote: “We call on all bloggers and social media influencers to respect our family’s privacy at this time.”
While tributes have poured in from across the Nigerian entertainment industry, much of the attention since the announcement has settled not on Jacobs’ career, but on his wife. In the hours since the family’s statement, an old interview of Silva’s has resurfaced, one in which she spoke publicly, for the first time, about a private struggle she had carried for years.
In a 2021 conversation with media personality Chude Jideonwo, Silva revealed that Jacobs had been living with dementia with Lewy bodies, a degenerative brain disease, for several years. She explained the condition in plain terms, comparing it to Parkinson’s in the way it affects the brain rather than the body, and said that Jacobs, at the time, did not fully understand what was happening to him. She described him as someone who was “there but not there.”
That interview came after years of persistent online rumours about Jacobs’ death, rumours Silva and the family had repeatedly denied, including as recently as June 2024, when their eldest son Soji appeared on television to confirm his father was still alive. For years, Silva carried both the reality of her husband’s declining health and a public that kept prematurely mourning him, without ever explaining what was actually happening at home.
Silva and Jacobs married in 1985, when she was 24 and he was 44, a union that would go on to last more than three decades and produce two children. In a separate, older interview that has also resurfaced this week, Silva recalled how the two first met on a movie set, saying that for Jacobs it was love at first sight, but for her, the feeling took longer to arrive.
The family did not disclose Jacobs’ illness publicly until Silva spoke about it in 2021. They have now asked the public for privacy following his death.”
