Goldberg, Whoopi

Source:

 African American National Biography

Goldberg, Whoopi

(13 Nov. 1955– ),

actress and comedian, was born Caryn Elaine Johnson in New York City, the second of two children of Emma Harris, a sometime teacher and nurse, and Robert Johnson, who left the family when Goldberg was a toddler. Goldberg attended St. Columbia School, a parochial school located several blocks from the family's working-class neighborhood. New York provided a stimulating, multicultural environment that encouraged Goldberg to reject the strictures of her Catholic education. By age eight, with the support of her mother, she began acting at the Hudson Guild in the Helena Rubinstein Children's Theater, and she also showed a precocious interest in ballet and music.

Goldberg appeared in as many Hudson Guild productions as possible, but was less focused on her schoolwork. Her academic difficulties were exacerbated by dyslexia, though this was not diagnosed until later, and she dropped out of Washington Irving High School at age fourteen. Although Goldberg's teenage insecurities were hardly atypical, she was particularly discouraged by the racism endemic in the career path that she hoped to follow: the movie industry. In Hollywood, a white standard of beauty predominated, and glamorous roles for black actresses had traditionally been reserved for light-skinned and lithe performers like Dorothy Dandridge and Lena Horne. Caryn Johnson, however, was a brown-skinned beauty with full features of a type not yet acceptable to the entertainment industry's limited and racially determined ideas of beauty. But such racism did not deter her thespian ambitions, and she appeared in the chorus of the Broadway musicals Jesus Christ Superstar and Hair.

After leaving school, Goldberg had an unexpected pregnancy and abortion, and she became, as she later explained, “chemically dependent on many things for many years.” Later, the escapades, pain, and difficulties of this period became fodder for her stand-up comedy routines, finding their way into her one-woman show. Eventually she entered treatment for substance abuse, and in 1973 she married her drug counselor, Alvin Martin. Their daughter, Alexandra, was born a year later, but the couple separated in the mid-1970s and Goldberg moved with her young daughter to San Diego, California. There she worked as a beautician, funeral home hairstylist, and bank teller while performing in local theater groups. She was also, for a few years, on welfare before finding success at the San Diego Repertory Company, appearing in Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage, and with Spontaneous Combustion, an improvisational comedy group. Making her professional aspirations a reality required one more thing: to change her name, which she found boring, to a memorable moniker. She first chose “Whoopi Cushion” and then dropped Cushion for Goldberg, after her Jewish relatives.

Whoopi Goldberg, joking around as she reads to children inside the Scholastic tent at the Tribeca Family Festival in New York City, 8 May 2004. (AP Images.)

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In the late 1970s Goldberg moved to Berkeley, California, where she lived with her daughter and the playwright-performer David Schein. Performing at the Blake Street Hawkeyes Theater in 1982, she developed a one-woman play, The Spook Show, which she based on characters derived from life. The show included monologues spoken by a thirteen-year-old valley girl–surfer chick who uses a hanger to give herself an abortion, a seven-year-old black girl who pines for blue eyes, and Fontaine, a junkie with a PhD in Literature. Her performance and some of her characters were controversial; but more importantly, they were fresh, anarchic, and hilarious. Goldberg toured the United States and Europe with The Spook Show and in 1983 performed at the Dance Theater Workshop in New York, where the director Mike Nichols approached her about bringing the production to Broadway. Instead, Goldberg returned to San Francisco and mounted Moms, a one-woman show that she cowrote as a tribute to the vaudevillian Moms Mabley. A year later Goldberg returned to New York and to Nichols. Her debut on Broadway, in the newly renamed show, Whoopi Goldberg, won her Theatre World and Drama Desk awards, and in 1985 she received a Grammy Award for Best Comedy Recording.

In 1985 Goldberg made her film debut in Steven Spielberg's adaptation of Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Grossing more than $80 million at the box office and earning an additional $50 million in home video rentals, the film was an unexpected commercial success. Its reception among African Americans was more controversial, however, as some black viewers believed that an African American filmmaker should have directed the movie; others took issue with what they deemed to be the material's unsympathetic depiction of black men. There was no such disagreement about Goldberg's strong, subtle performance, for which she received an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe Award.

In addition to performing stand-up and touring with her one-woman show Living on the Edge of Chaos, Goldberg worked steadily in film and on television during the last half of the 1980s, although, with the exception of Jumpin' Jack Flash (1986), her films—Burglar (1987), Fatal Beauty (1987), Clara's Heart (1988), and The Telephone (1988)—were only marginal hits. Goldberg became a household name with Ghost (1990). The film grossed more than $517 million worldwide and earned Goldberg an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, the second Oscar awarded to a black woman. (Hattie McDaniel had won in 1939.) In 1992's Sister Act, Goldberg again struck box-office gold and won a second Golden Globe, although this time, Hollywood acknowledged, she carried the film.

Having proved her financial value, Goldberg began balancing her Hollywood film appearances in comedies such as Made in America (1993), Eddie (1996), and The Associate (1996) with roles in smaller, independent films, including The Long Walk Home (1990), a film about the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott; a hilarious role as a cop in Robert Altman's Hollywood satire The Player (1992); Sarafina! (1992), a musical drama set in apartheid South Africa; Corrina, Corrina (1994), a 1950s period film in which she unexpectedly ends up as the romantic interest opposite the white actor Ray Liotta. She also appeared in Boys on the Side (1995), How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1998), and Girl, Interrupted (1999). In 1996 Goldberg portrayed Myrlie Evers-Williams, the wife of the slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers, in the film Ghosts of Mississippi.

Goldberg's television career has been even more prodigious. In 1986, along with comedians Billy Crystal and Robin Williams, she began hosting the semiannual live broadcast Comic Relief, a comedy showcase fund-raiser for the homeless, and in 1992 she launched a short-lived, self-titled, late-night talk show. As she became one of America's most recognizable cultural figures, Goldberg was increasingly tapped to host television tributes and to appear in cameos as “herself.” She also appeared in her own HBO stand-up specials and had a recurring role (1988–1993) as Guinan on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Her pivotal role in the 1994 and 2002 Star Trek films further proved her popularity and crossover appeal. In 1994 Goldberg hosted the 66th Annual Academy Awards, becoming the first black woman to preside over the Oscars since Diana Ross had cohosted in 1974. She returned to emcee the awards in 1996, 1999, and 2002. From 1998 until 2002 she was also executive producer and appeared as the center square of the Emmy Award–winning television game show Hollywood Squares.

Following her successful return to Broadway in 1997 as the lead in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Goldberg expanded her theatrical activities, coproducing the Broadway revival of Thoroughly Modern Millie (2002) and Harlem Song (2002), a new musical by George C. Wolfe, and starring in and producing the Broadway revival of August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (2002), though the reviews for her performance were mixed.

Offscreen, Goldberg married David Claessen, a Dutch-born director of photography, in 1986, after her relationship with Schein ended in 1985. Goldberg's subsequent private relationship with the actor Ted Danson sparked public controversy after Danson performed in blackface at the Friars Club roast of the actress in 1993. The following year she entered into a one-year marriage with the union organizer Lyle Trachtenberg, whom she met when he was unionizing the crew of Corrina, Corrina. From 1995 through 2000 she was involved with the actor Frank Langella.

The author of the best-selling Book (1997), Goldberg is the recipient of more than forty awards, including six People's Choice awards, five Kids' Choice awards, and nine NAACP Image awards; she has garnered fourteen Emmy nominations and the 2001 Kennedy Center's Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. Goldberg has been recognized as well for her humanitarian efforts on behalf of children, the homeless, human rights, substance abuse, and the battle against AIDS. (Her father died in 1993 from stomach cancer and complications from HIV infection.) In 1995 her hands, feet, and signature braids were pressed in cement outside Mann's Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles, and in 2001, on her forty-sixth birthday, she received a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame.

Despite being an African American woman in a white-dominated industry, Goldberg has become a mainstay in American entertainment. An iconoclastic comedian and commentator, she uses humor both to critique and to amuse her audiences. Over the years there has been a mixed response to her celebrity. Some film critics and historians argue that her asexual characters perpetuate the iconic stereotype of the black mammy in the white household, while others interpret her screen persona differently, viewing Goldberg as an iconoclastic figure and countercultural force. However, even Whoopi—whose name signifies both flatulence and lovemaking—has expressed frustration with the selective editing of sex scenes that have landed on the cutting room floor. Goldberg returned to television in 2003 with the sitcom Whoopi, in which she played Mavis Rae, a one-hit wonder who now runs a small New York hotel. “Why not be active doing stuff that's still interesting to me? This was handed to me on a silver platter with no restrictions and no hassles. I have the ability to do the show I wanted to do” (Jet 104, no. 18 [2003]). Critics generally praised the show and compared the prickly, politically incorrect Mavis Rae to the Archie Bunker character in the 1970s sitcom All in the Family. In 2006, Goldberg appeared on an episode of African American Lives, in which host Henry Louis Gates, Jr. traced her ancestry back to Florida of the Reconstruction Era.

Often described as too fat, too funny, too noisy, and too rebellious, Whoopi Goldberg, who is willing to offend and to be offensive, has become what the critic Kathleen Rowe has termed an “unruly woman.” In Broadway performances, movies, and television appearances, she has played defiant characters who overturn social hierarchies, cross racial boundaries, and subvert conventional authority. Since 2007 Goldberg has been a regular contributor to the television talk show, The View, and in 2009 shared an Emmy Award for Outstanding Talk Show Host with her colleagues. In 2010 Goldberg appeared in For Colored Girls, Tyler Perry’s adaptation of Ntozake Shange's play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf. In 2011 she appeared as God in the romantic comedy, A Little Bit of Heaven, in a cameo in The Muppets, and was the narrator of Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey, a documentary film on the career of Kevin Clash, the puppeteer and voice of Sesame Street’s Elmo.

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