Whoopi Goldberg ; born Caryn Elaine Johnson, November 13, 1955) is an American comedian, actress, singer-songwriter, political activist, and talk show host.
Goldberg made her film debut in The Color Purple (1985) playing Celie, a mistreated black woman in the Deep South. She received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress and won her first Golden Globe Award for her role in the film. In 1990, she starred as Oda Mae Brown, a psychic helping a slain man (Patrick Swayze) find his killer in the blockbuster film Ghost. This performance won her a second Golden Globe and an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Notable later films include Sister Act and Sister Act 2, The Lion King, Made in America, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, Girl, Interrupted and Rat Race. She is also acclaimed for her roles as the bartender Guinan in Star Trek: The Next Generation and as Terry Dolittle in Jumpin' Jack Flash. Her latest role is the voice of Stretch in Toy Story 3.
Goldberg has been nominated for 13 Emmy Awards for her work in television. She was co-producer of the popular game show Hollywood Squares from 1998 to 2004. She has been the moderator of the daytime talk show The View since 2007. Goldberg has a Grammy, two Emmys, two Golden Globes, a Tony, and an Oscar. In addition, Goldberg has a British Academy Film Award, four People's Choice Awards and has been honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and is one of the few entertainers who have won an Oscar, Emmy, Grammy, and Tony Award.
Goldberg was born Caryn Elaine Johnson in New York City and raised in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood, the daughter of Emma (née Harris), a nurse and teacher, and Robert James Johnson, Jr., a clergyman. Goldberg has described her mother as a "stern, strong, and wise woman" who raised her as a single mother after Goldberg's father had left the family. Goldberg's recent ancestors migrated north from Faceville, Georgia, Palatka, Florida, and Virginia. Results of a DNA test, revealed in the 2006 PBS documentary African American Lives, traced most of her ancestry to the Papel and Bayote people of modern-day Guinea-Bissau. Her admixture test (a test whose significance is still debated by geneticists) reveals that of the .1% of DNA tested, 92 percent is of sub-Saharan African origin and 8 percent is of European origin.
Her stage name, Whoopi, was taken from whoopee cushion; she has stated that "If you get a little gassy, you've got to let it go. So people used to say to me, 'You're like a whoopee cushion.' And that's where the name came from." She adopted the traditionally German/Jewish surname Goldberg as a stage name because her mother felt the original surname of Johnson was not "Jewish enough" to make her a star. According to an anecdote told by Nichelle Nichols in the documentary film Trekkies, a young Goldberg was watching Star Trek, and upon seeing Nichols' character Uhura, exclaimed, "Momma! There's a black lady on TV and she ain't no maid!" This spawned life-long fandom of Star Trek for Goldberg, who would eventually accept a recurring guest-starring role on Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Goldberg's first appeared onscreen in 1981–82 in Citizen: I'm Not Losing My Mind, I'm Giving It Away, an avant-garde ensemble feature by San Francisco filmmaker William Farley. Goldberg created The Spook Show, a one-woman show composed of different character monologues, in 1983. Director Mike Nichols was instantly impressed and offered to take the show to Broadway. The self-titled show ran from October 24, 1984 to March 10, 1985 for a total of 156 sold-out performances. While on Broadway, Goldberg's performance caught the eye of director Steven Spielberg. He was about to direct the film The Color Purple, based on Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Alice Walker. Having read the novel, she was ecstatic at being offered a lead role in her first motion picture. Goldberg received compliments on her acting from Spielberg, Walker, and music consultant Quincy Jones. The Color Purple was released in late 1985, and was a critical and commercial success. It was later nominated for 11 Academy Awards including a nomination for Goldberg as Best Actress. The movie did not win any of its Academy Award nominations, but Goldberg won the Golden Globe Award.
Goldberg starred in Penny Marshall's directorial debut, Jumpin' Jack Flash, and began a relationship with David Claessen, a director of photography on the set, and the couple married later that year. The movie was a success, and during the next two years, three additional motion pictures featured Goldberg, Burglar, Fatal Beauty, and The Telephone. Though not as successful as her prior motion pictures, Goldberg still garnered awards from the NAACP Image Awards. Claessen and Goldberg divorced after the box office failure of The Telephone, which Goldberg was under contract to star in. She tried to sue the producers of the film, to no avail. The 1988 movie, Clara's Heart, was critically acclaimed, and featured a young Neil Patrick Harris. As the 1980s concluded, she participated in the numerous HBO specials of Comic Relief with fellow comedians Robin Williams and Billy Crystal.
In January 1990, Goldberg starred with Jean Stapleton in the TV situation comedy Bagdad Cafe. The show ran for two seasons on CBS. Simultaneously, Goldberg starred in The Long Walk Home, portraying a woman in the Civil Rights Movement. She played a psychic in the 1990 film Ghost, and became the first black female to win the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in nearly 50 years, and only the second black female in Oscar history to win an acting award. Premiere Magazine named her character, Oda Mae Brown, to the list of Top 100 best movie characters of all time.
Goldberg starred in Soapdish and had a recurring role on Star Trek: The Next Generation as Guinan, which she would reprise in two Star Trek movies. On May 29, 1992, Sister Act was released. The motion picture grossed well over US$100 million and Goldberg was nominated for a Golden Globe. Next, she starred in Sarafina!. During the next year, she hosted a late-night talk show, The Whoopi Goldberg Show and starred in two more motion pictures Made in America and Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit. From 1994 to 1995, Whoopi appeared in Corrina, Corrina, The Lion King (voice), The Pagemaster (voice), Boys on the Side, and Moonlight and Valentino. Goldberg became the first African-American female to host the Academy Awards in 1994. She hosted the Awards again in 1996, 1999, and 2002. Goldberg released four motion pictures in 1996: Bogus (with Gerard Depardieu and Haley Joel Osment), Eddie, The Associate (with Dianne Wiest) and Ghosts of Mississippi (with Alec Baldwin and James Woods). During the filming of Eddie, Goldberg began dating co-star Frank Langella, a relationship which lasted until early 2000. In October 1997, Goldberg and ghostwriter Daniel Paisner, cowrote Book, a collection featuring insights and opinions. In November and December 2005, Goldberg revived her one-woman show on Broadway at the Lyceum Theatre in honor of its 20th anniversary.
From 1998 to 2001, Goldberg took supporting roles in the How Stella Got Her Groove Back with Angela Basset, Girl, Interrupted with Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie, Kingdom Come, and Rat Race with an all-star ensemble cast. She also played the voice of Liz on the first four seasons of popular PBS program The Magic Schoolbus. She starred in the successful ABC-TV versions of Cinderella, A Knight in Camelot, and the TNT Original Movie, Call Me Claus. In 1998, she gained a new audience when she became the "Center Square" on Hollywood Squares, hosted by Tom Bergeron. She also served as Executive Producer, for which she was nominated for 4 Emmys. She left the show in 2002, and the "Center Square" was filled in with celebrities for the last two on-air seasons without Goldberg. In 2003, Goldberg returned to television, starring in the NBC comedy, Whoopi, which was canceled after one season. On her 48th birthday, Goldberg was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Goldberg also appeared along side Samuel Jackson and Angela Bassett in the HBO special Unchained Memories, narrating slave narratives. During the next two years, she became a spokeswoman for Slim Fast and produced two television sitcoms: Lifetime's original drama Strong Medicine that ran for six seasons and Whoopi's Littleburg, a Nickelodeon show for younger children. Goldberg made guest appearances on Everybody Hates Chris, as an elderly character named Louise Clarkson. She produced the Noggin sitcom Just For Kicks, in early 2006. She was a guest at Elton John's 60th birthday bash and concert at Madison Square Garden on March 25, 2007.
On September 4, 2007, Goldberg became the new moderator and co-host of The View, replacing Rosie O'Donnell. O'Donnell stated on her official blog that she wanted Goldberg to be moderator. Goldberg's debut as moderator drew 3.4 million viewers, 1 million fewer than O'Donnell's debut ratings. After two weeks, however, The View was averaging 3.5 million total viewers under Goldberg, a 7% increase from 3.3 million under O'Donnell the previous season.
Goldberg's first appearance on the show was controversial when she made statements about Michael Vick's dogfighting as being "part of his cultural upbringing" and "not all that unusual" in parts of the South. Another comment that stirred controversy was the statement that the Chinese "have a very different relationship to cats" and that "you and I would be very pissed if somebody ate kitty." Some defended Goldberg, including her co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck, saying that her comments were taken out of context by the press, because she repeated several times that she did not condone what Vick did.
On more than one occasion, Goldberg has expressed strong disagreement and irritation with different remarks made by Elisabeth Hasselbeck, such as on October 3, 2007, when Hasselbeck commented that Hillary Clinton's proposed US$ 5,000 baby entitlement might lead to fewer abortions because of women wanting to keep the money.
Goldberg also created controversy when on September 28, 2009, during a discussion of Roman Polanski's case, she opined that Polanski's rape of a thirteen year old in 1977 was not "rape-rape". Goldberg later clarified that she had intended to highlight the exact charge brought against Polanski, namely statutory rape, i.e. unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor, rather than rape with an unwilling participant. Polanski had been initially charged with "rape by use of drugs, perversion, sodomy, lewd and lascivious act upon a child under 14, and furnishing a controlled substance to a minor", but under a plea bargain, Polanski pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor with the graver charges dropped, before fleeing to France, hours before he was to be formally sentenced.
After comedienne Kathy Griffin referred to Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown's daughters as "prostitutes", Goldberg said that if anyone insulted her daughter like that then "I would beat their ass." The audience reacted with shock, and support.
Goldberg has been married three times — in 1973 to Alvin Martin (divorced in 1979, one daughter), in 1986 to cinematographer David Claessen (divorced in 1988), and in 1994 to the actor Lyle Trachtenberg (divorced in 1995). She has also been romantically linked with actors Frank Langella and Ted Danson.
When Goldberg was 18, she and Alvin Martin had one daughter, Alexandrea, an actress (born 1973, aka Alex Martin and Alex Dean). Goldberg became a grandmother at the age of 34 when her 16 year-old daughter gave birth. The family appeared in a GAP ad. Goldberg has two granddaughters: Amarah Skye and Jerzey. She also has a grandson named Mason.
Goldberg was involved in controversy in July 2004 when, at a fundraiser for John Kerry at Radio City Music Hall in New York, Goldberg made a sexual joke about President George W. Bush, by waving a bottle of wine, pointing toward her pubic area and saying: "We should keep Bush where he belongs, and not in the White House." Slim-Fast, the biggest company in US health shake market, took exception to these comments made by Goldberg and dropped her from their current ad campaign.
As a result of several bad experiences, Goldberg had not flown on an airplane since the mid-late 1990s, instead traveling via a personal bus. In an interview on CNN's Piers Morgan Tonight, Goldberg stated that her fear of flying stems from witnessing the PSA Flight 182 midair collision with a Cessna 172 which resulted in the deaths of 144 people. She admitted to Jay Leno that it takes 42 hours of non-stop travel to get from New York City to Los Angeles this way. In April 2009, Goldberg flew to London for the first time as a result of taking a ten hour course with Virgin Atlantic Airways. On Friday Night with Jonathan Ross, she said she may now fly more in the future.
On August 29, 2010, Goldberg's mother Emma Johnson died after suffering a stroke. She left London, UK at the time, where she had been performing in Sister Act the Musical, but returned to perform on October 22, 2010.
Whoopi has admitted publicly to having been a "high functioning" drug addict, at one point being too terrified to even leave her bed to go use the toilet.
Goldberg has received two Academy Award nominations, for The Color Purple and Ghost, winning for Ghost. She is the recipient of the 1985 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding One-Person Show for her solo performance on Broadway. She has received eight Daytime Emmy nominations, winning two. She has received five (non-daytime) Emmy nominations. She has received three Golden Globe nominations, winning two. She won a Grammy Award in 1985 and a Tony Award as a producer of the Broadway musical Thoroughly Modern Millie. She has won three People's Choice Awards. In 1999, she received the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation Vanguard Award for her continued work in supporting the gay and lesbian community. She has been nominated for five American Comedy Awards with two wins. In 2001, she won the prestigious Mark Twain Prize for American Humor at the Kennedy Center as well as the Women in Film Crystal Award for outstanding women who, through their endurance and the excellence of their work, have helped to expand the role of women within the entertainment industry. In 2009, Goldberg won the Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Talk Show Host for her role on The View. She shares the award with co-hosts Joy Behar, Sherri Shepherd, Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Barbara Walters.
Goldberg is one of few to win an Oscar, a Grammy, a Tony, and an Emmy. She has been seen in over 150 films, and during a period in the 1990s, Whoopi was the highest-paid actress of all time. Her humanitarian efforts include working for Comic Relief, recently reuniting with Billy Crystal and Robin Williams for the 20th Anniversary of Comic Relief.
In February 2002, Goldberg sent her Oscar statuette from Ghost to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to be cleaned and replated. During this time, the statuette was taken from its shipping container, and later retrieved by the shipping company, UPS.
In 1990 Whoopi was officially named an honorary member of the Harlem Globetrotters exhibition basketball team by the members.
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