My review of From Mud Hut to Star Wars & Beyond, by Femi Taylor

From Mud Hut to Star Wars & Beyond

by Femi Taylor

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Femi Taylor is, like so many entertainment figures, so much more than what her fanbase sees.

She has lived for decades in the peculiar half‑light of cultural visibility — instantly recognisable yet largely unexamined, iconic yet misunderstood. To millions of Star Wars fans she is Oola, the green‑skinned dancer swallowed by Jabba’s palace, a momentary flash of movement that won a cult status.

But the woman behind that image has travelled far further, through landscapes of loss, reinvention and artistic grit that make the familiar story of sci‑fi fame feel almost incidental. 

Her memoir is not a celebrity artefact but a reclamation — a deliberate, unhurried stitching together of a life lived across continents, cultures and identities.

Taylor’s beginnings are almost unbearably stark. Born in a mud hut in Ajao, Southern Nigeria, she entered the world beside her twin brother Tim covered in flies, her dead mother Felicia Omoniyi lying in a pool of blood, a scene that lands with the blunt force of witness testimony.

Her father, overwhelmed and impoverished, surrenders the twins to an orphanage run by Irish sisters in Ibadan. It is a story shaped not only by personal tragedy but by the long tail of colonialism, missionary intervention and the fragile infrastructures of post‑independence Nigeria. 

Taylor’s early life sits at the intersection of global forces — poverty, migration, religious charity — that continue to shape the trajectories of countless children across the Global South. She does not theorise this; she simply lives it. But the sociocultural resonance is unmistakable.

Adoption into a cultivated Hampstead household brings safety, education and opportunity — but also dislocation. Taylor grows up between worlds: Nigerian by birth, British by upbringing, and never entirely at ease in either. 

Her childhood becomes a case study in the quiet ache of transracial adoption, the unspoken labour of navigating identity in a society that still struggles to understand the complexities of belonging. 

She learns early that identity is not a fixed inheritance but a negotiation — a shifting, sometimes fragile balance between origin and environment.

Her artistic life unfolds with the same candour. Taylor’s West End years — Cats, Jesus Christ Superstar, the Palladium, the Royal Albert Hall — are described with affectionate insider detail. 

But beneath the backstage camaraderie lies a deeper sociocultural story: the emergence of the 'triple threat' performer in the late 20th century, the intensifying demands placed on dancers’ bodies, and the unspoken racial dynamics of British theatre. 

Taylor’s presence in these spaces — a Black woman navigating overwhelmingly white institutions — is quietly radical. She does not frame it as such, but the reader cannot miss the significance. 

Her memoir becomes a window into the lived experience of performers who must excel not only artistically but socially, negotiating stereotypes, expectations and the subtle pressures of representation.

The camaraderie she describes — intense, fleeting, forged under pressure — speaks to the emotional architecture of theatre: a world where 'ships‑in‑the‑night' relationships form and dissolve with each production. 

It is a portrait of an industry that offers both sanctuary and precarity, community and exhaustion. Taylor writes about these dynamics with a gentle frankness, never romanticising the grind but never diminishing the joy either.

Star Wars enters the memoir almost sideways. Taylor treats her cult status with amused detachment. She knows Oola is iconic, but she also knows the role is a sliver of her life, not its defining feature. 

Yet the sociocultural implications are worth lingering on. Oola is one of the earliest Black women in the Star Wars universe — a franchise that has long struggled with representation. Taylor’s brief appearance became a paradox: hyper‑visible yet narratively disposable, adored yet marginal. 

Her memoir does not interrogate this directly, but the magazine‑profile lens allows us to see the broader pattern: how Black performers in global franchises often become symbols without agency, remembered for moments rather than careers.

Her recollections of father of Star Wars franchise George Lucas, Dame Gillian Lynne, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Sir Cameron Mackintosh and the constellation of colleagues around them are refreshingly egalitarian. Fame is not a hierarchy she subscribes to; people are people, whether household names or backstage stalwarts. 

This refusal to differentiate becomes a quiet act of resistance against the celebrity economy itself. 

The photographic inserts — tastefully placed at the end — reinforce this democratic spirit. Shakespearean thespian Brian Blessed OBE, heavy metal icon Meat Loaf, Jeff Goldblum, beloved Queen legend Freddie Mercury, Luke Skywalker alter ego Mark Hamill, Jedi buddy Billy Dee Williams, The Fonz himself Henry Winkler, Lou Diamond Phillips, Giancarlo Esposito: they appear not as trophies but as fellow travellers, part of the long, improbable journey.

What ultimately distinguishes Taylor’s memoir is its spiritual undercurrent. She writes with a gentleness that never tips into sentimentality, a humility that feels earned rather than performed. 

Her penned reflections on identity, belonging and the slow work of becoming, echo the quiet wisdom of that other indomitable soul sister, the late great Dr Maya Angelo.

This is where the memoir transcends genre. It becomes not a celebrity narrative but a meditation on what it means to build a life from fragments: orphanhood, adoption, artistry, motherhood, Buddhism, global citizenship. 

Taylor’s story is not linear; it is layered, recursive, shaped by the ongoing negotiation between past and present.

In a publishing landscape crowded with celebrity quick‑reads, From Mud Hut to Star Wars and Beyond feels like an outlier: intimate without indulgence, candid without spectacle, and quietly luminous. 

Taylor emerges not as a footnote in a blockbuster franchise but as a woman who has lived many lives and learned to inhabit them all. Her memoir becomes a case study in the politics of visibility, the sociology of performance and the psychology of belonging. 

This is a story of survival without bitterness, resilience without bravado and success without vanity — a long journey toward becoming, and one that earns every word of its subtitle: A Memoir of Identity, Belonging and Becoming.

Femi Taylor is, at the end of the day: an orphan, a multi-genre dancer, sometime actress, reluctant catwalk model, adoring mother, interior designer, property developer and so much more … all with Buddhist highlights.

What more could a reader want?