Nollywood actress, Victoria Inyama has declared that the label “actress” is no longer a thing to be proud considering the current state of the industry.
In an interview with Punch Newspaper’s Saturday Beats, Inyama who now resides in the United Kingdom says during her days as an actress, a lot of people were fueled by genuine love for the profession and not just fame and money.
She said, “My days in the industry were lovely; there was so much love; there was so much hard work. People wanted to act for acting sake, they didn’t want to act because of money. We were competing with who could cry the most, memorise long lines the most, who was the saddest character and stuffs like that unlike now that it is all about unnecessary competition like cars and houses. Back then, it was just innocent and genuine competition. It wasn’t for the fame but integrity.”
“The truth is, these days it is an embarrassment being called an actress. You want to be called something else because there is no respect for that name anymore. Sometimes, I can’t wait to qualify as a psychologist so that when you think of Victoria Inyama, it will be in another light. Those in the industry now are doing a lot of things that shouldn’t be done in 2018. It is not just one particular thing that they should stop doing; from the picture, story line, artistes and costumes, some of them are just weird and out of place. Once I see certain names in the production, I don’t even bother”, she added.
Speaking on her experience battling and surviving cancer, Inyama said, “It started while I was in Nigeria, I used to have serious pain on the left side of my head, I went to notable hospitals and they used to say I had migraine, they gave me drugs for migraine. None of the hospitals bothered to do a proper MRI scan or anything like that. But when I got married and I had to relocate, it got worse and I had to be checked. They found out that I had some cancerous growth in my head; that was in 2005. The medics started the treatment almost immediately. I got married in 2003 and relocated in 2004; when they noticed it, I had just got pregnant with my first child. When I got pregnant, the pain subsided.
“I had to undergo an emergency surgery in 2006 and waited for the place to heal and by February 2007, the growth was actually blocking somewhere around my left eye and I was almost going blind. The doctors said they had to remove the growth in my head. Apparently what they brought out from my head, they cultured it and they had to call me back and told me it was a cancerous cell. They recommended chemotherapy and radiotherapy”