The late Kwame Owusu Ansah
It's been eight(8) years since one of the greatest pillars of the movie industry, Kwame Owusu ANSAH met his untimely death in a fatal accident in Accra on the 2nd of May, 2008 whiles driving on the Tema Motorway.
Born in Accra to Smart Owusu Ansah and Victoria Cosmos, Kwame hailed from Kumasi. He had his formal education at Koforidua Madonna School, then at Accra New Town Primary School, Pope John’s, Wesley Grammar, Abuakwa State College, and then to PRESEC, Legon, before privately taking a two-year diploma course in marketing.
Since Kwame’s future ambition was to establish his own advertising company, he enrolled at the Ghana Institute of Journalism (GIJ) to study advertising and public relations.
According to Kwame, after GIJ he taught Economics, Government and English Language for one year at Harvard College, Accra New Town, before working as a Postal Clerk at P&T, now Ghana Post.
All this while, Kwame was writing poems and reading them on air at the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC). On one of those visits, Getty Opare Addo asked him to venture into radio, because he had the qualities of a good presenter.
“I obliged and approached Charlie Sam who was the Head of Programmes at Radio GAR. He had just auditioned some people who wanted to be presenters. I passed the audition and started work at Radio GAR in April 1996. A few months later, someone left Garden City Radio so I was asked to take over his position in Kumasi.”
At GAR, Kwame coordinated radio programs and the activities of marketing departments, arranging for contracts as well as taking on the duties of a full-time presenter.
Additionally, Kwame was a Public Relations Consultant for movie-making companies in Kumasi.
As a presenter at GAR on lunch time programme, Work and Happiness, he said he loved challenges and was never content till he got to the top of anything that he was doing.
That was how The African Child shifted some of his attention to film acting when men like Abbey and Zack Orji, Nigerian actors, advised him to give it a try.
Kwame said since then he had featured in about 60 movies, some of which are: 'A Stab in the Dark, The Visitor, Jewels 1&2, Time, Grace to Grass, Married to a Witch, Okukuseku 1,2 &3, Born Again, Axe of Vengeance, Spirit of Darkness, End of the River, Errors of the Past' and 'Wedding Day'.
Talking about the Ghana film industry, Kwame said there had been a lot of improvement and also thought that film actors and actresses now knew what the people of Ghana wanted and were doing exactly so.
“Everything you do, you have to look out for what your audience want and give it to them”, he said.
