Regina Askia’s story is an interesting one in which she is born, attends primary, secondary and tertiary schools in Lagos, travels the world as a beauty queen and returns to fortune on television and then Nollywood. But she quits all that when the ovation is loudest as the best actress in the Nigerian film industry to get married and settle in the United States of America. Were a movie about her life to be made, it would most likely be titled, ‘Having it all’.
Born Imaobong Regina Askia in Lagos of parents from Ukanafun in present-day Akwa Ibom State the year the Nigerian civil war started, she went on to obtain a biology degree at the University of Lagos(UNILAG) by 1989. No sooner did the klieg lights come calling when she won the Most Beautiful in Nigeria (MBGN). To be more precise, when the then queen, Bianca Onu, went on to marry Odumegwu Ojukwu, the war lord in the war mentioned earlier, Askia stepped in her shoes. But she has been able to prove over the years that she was her own woman, a leading one at that. Who can even count the number of movies she was in those heady 1990s of the rejuvenation of Nollywood. Who can even forget her role in Most Wanted which won her best actress in the Africa Movie Academy Awards (AMAA) in 1995?
What makes her life even more inspiring is that she has played the real life roles of educational activist, television producer, writer, model, public speaker, mother, wife and healthcare practitioner very well. She is currently based in the USA with her family where she is a family nurse. She is married to Ruddy Williams.
Bet you didn’t know she was first runner up at the Miss Charm International Beauty Pageant held in Leningrad, Russia in 1990.