Fabmimi News: The Telegraph Features Omotola Jolade Ekeinde As The Biggest Film Star You’ve Never Heard Of.Please read This Carefully.

OMOSEXY

Omotola Jalade Ekeinde, aka 'Omosexy’, is the queen of Nollywood according to The Telegraph , She’s appeared in more than 300 films, pulls in 150 million viewers for her reality-television show and has been named one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

She scores a zero on the Hollywood Richter scale. She has never starred in a major motion picture. Her most recent film, Last Flight to Abuja, means nothing to devotees of Netflix and LoveFilm.
When she sat next to Steven Spielberg at a Time magazine dinner earlier this year he didn’t know her name. Yet Omotola Jalade Ekeinde was attending that dinner because, like him, she had been honoured in Time’s 2013 list of the 100 Most Influential People in the World.
Alongside Kate Middleton, Michelle Obama and Beyoncé.The star of more than 300 films, Omotola – or “Omosexy”, as she is known to her legions of fans – is bigger across the African diaspora than Halle Berry.
Her reality-television show, Omotola: The Real Me, pulls in more viewers than Oprah’s and Tyra’s at their peak, combined, and she is the first African celebrity ever to amass more than one million Facebook “likes”.
When I meet her for the interview in a photographic studio in south-east London she is still recovering from getting mobbed by her Afro-Caribbean fan base in a nearby Tesco. “They practically had to shut down the store when people recognised me,” she says. “I actually got scared.”

Omotola is one of the biggest stars in Nollywood, the low-budget, high-output Nigerian film industry that churns out more English-language films than Hollywood or Bollywood (1,000-2,000 a year). Some have cinematic releases, but most are for the straight-to-video market.

When I watch her Stella photo-shoot from the sidelines it is immediately apparent that everything about her is BIG. Big body, big hair, big personality, big laugh: she comes across like Oprah’s sister.

She is here with her own film crew, who are recording for a future episode of her television show. Which means there is also a big, superstar delay – three hours – before our interview can start.

Many of her fans think her real name is “Omosexy”, she tells me, laughing, when we finally get to speak, but it was a nickname given to her by her husband, an airline pilot.

“He bought me a car back in 2009, and that was the plate number,” she recalls, speaking with kinetic, girlish excitement, rattling off sentences in fast, extended flurries.

Omotola in Last Flight to Abuja

“All my cars have special plate numbers, like Omotola 1.” When I ask how many cars she has, she laughs again, with embarrassment. “A few.” When she first saw her personalised licence plate she was horrified. “I thought, 'Oh no!’ It sounded cocky.

As if I was telling everybody, 'I’m sexy!’ Y’know-wha-I-mean?” She punctuates her sentences with this phrase, which she reels off as a single word.

The 35-year-old star has been acting since she was 16. Most recently she starred as Suzie, a passenger freshly spurned by her adulterous lover, in an aeroplane disaster movie, Last Flight to Abuja, which was the highest grossing film at the African box office last year.

Her breakthrough role came in 1995, in the Nollywood classic Mortal Inheritance, in which she played a sickle-cell patient fighting for her life. Since then she has established a staggering average of 16 films a year.

I put it to her that she must be the most prolific actress in the world. She laughs and shakes her head. “I am sure there are people who have beaten that record in Nigeria. Trust me.

It is easy to turn around with straight-to-video movies. It is the fashion to shoot until you drop, night and day. You have to remember that we are on very low budgets, so there is no time to wait.”

Nollywood began fewer than 20 years ago on the bustling streets of Lagos. Its pioneers were traders and bootleggers who started out selling copies of Hollywood films before graduating into producing their own titles as an inexpensive way to procure more content for a burgeoning market.

The traders finance the films (the average budget is £15,000-£30,000), then sell copies in bulk to local operators, who distribute them in markets, shops and street-corners for as little as £2 each.