Taiwo Hassan died on August 23, 2026. If that name doesn’t ring a bell, “Ogogo” for sure will.
For over four decades, Ogogo was one of Nollywood’s most charismatic faces, prominently in Yorùbá cinema. He could play a charming disciplinarian, a reckless antihero, a family head, or a street-bred character with the same conviction. He was 66. He’d been battling stage-four cancer, a fight his daughters, Kira and Haleemah, made painfully public just days before he passed, appealing for specialist care.
His daughter Kira announced his death on Instagram Live, breaking down mid-sentence: “My daddy is dead.” He was buried today, August 24, in his hometown of Ilaro, Ogun State, in line with Islamic rites.
If you’re unfamiliar with this man or just finding out who he was and why Nollywood is mourning, here’s why:
The boomers remember him from the 80s when his acting journey began on the theatre stage. For the millennials, they can retrace their recollection of their actor as a leading man who starred in the biggest Yoruba home movies of the 1990s and early 2000s such as “Okan Soso”, “Ibinu Elewon” and “Owo Blow.”
For Gen Alpha and some Gen Z, their introduction to Ogogo is memes, short clips from popular movies and the pop culture moment when his classic line gave life to “Last Last”, Burna Boy’s global hit song. All in all, Ogogo was a household name.
Contrary to the popular belief that he got the name from the “Owo Blow” movies, Ogogo comes from his family’s oriki. It’s the Yorùbá praise-poetry tradition used to trace lineage and heritage, which he adopted as his stage identity since his early theatre days.
Ogogo’s filmography runs past 300 titles, but here are few that people keep bringing up in tribute:
Across most of them, the storyline runs across family drama, moral conflict, and characters rooted hard in Yorùbá tradition. Ogogo was a character larger than life; he had a charm he carried almost like he barely noticed it himself.
Tributes have started pouring in, from his Nollywood colleagues and fans to media personalities and Nigerians home and abroad.
The common thread across almost every tribute: Ogogo was more than an actor people watched. He was a cultural fixture whose platform pushed for indigenous storytelling and Yorùbá heritage right up until the end.
Rest well, Ogogo, the Action Man.
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