Whoopi Goldberg
Goldberg began her career on stage with a series of one-woman shows, and a recording of her Broadway show Whoopi Goldberg (1984โ1985) won the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album. For playing a mistreated woman in the Deep South in Steven Spielberg's period drama The Color Purple (1985), she won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress.
She followed this with leading roles in the comedy Jumpin' Jack Flash (1986) and the drama Clara's Heart (1988), and played Guinan in the science fiction series Star Trek: The Next Generation (1988โ1993). Her portrayal of an eccentric psychic in the romantic fantasy Ghost (1990) won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, making her the second African-American woman to win an Oscar.
Goldberg headlined the comedies Sister Act (1992) and its sequel Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit (1993), becoming the highest-paid actress at the time. She also acted in the comedies Soapdish (1991) and Corrina, Corrina (1994), the dramas Ghosts of Mississippi (1996) and Girl, Interrupted (1999), and voiced Shenzi the hyena in the animated feature The Lion King (1994).
She returned to stage in the late 1990s, starring in revivals of Stephen Sondheim's musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (2002) and August Wilson's play Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (2003), and winning the Tony Award for Best Musical for producing Thoroughly Modern Millie (2002).
Since 2007, Goldberg has co-hosted and moderated the daytime talk show The View, winning a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Talk Show Host from ten nominations, and hosted the Academy Awards four times. She joined the stage adaptation of Sister Act (2011) as a performer and producer, and appeared in the animated film Toy Story 3 (2010) and the biographical drama Till (2022).
She also reprised the role of Guinan in the series Star Trek: Picard (2022) and played Miss Hannigan in a revival of Annie (2025โ2026).
Early life
Caryn Elaine Johnson was born in Manhattan, New York City, on November 13, 1955, the daughter of Emma Johnson (nรฉe Harris), a nurse and teacher, and Robert James Johnson Jr., a Baptist clergyman. She was raised in a public housing project, the Chelsea-Elliot Houses, in New York City. She described her mother as a "stern, strong, and wise woman" who raised her as a single mother with her brother Clyde (c. 1949 โ 2015).
Raised Catholic, she attended a local parochial school in Manhattan, St Columba's. Her more recent forebears migrated north from Faceville, Georgia; Palatka, Florida; and Virginia. She dropped out of Washington Irving High School. Goldberg has said that her family is "Jewish, Buddhist, Baptist, and Catholic."
Researcher Henry Louis Gates Jr. found that all of Goldberg's traceable ancestors were black, that she had no known Jewish ancestry, and that none of her ancestors were named Goldberg. Results of a DNA test, revealed in the 2006 PBS documentary African American Lives, traced part of her ancestry to the Papel and Bayote people of modern-day Guinea-Bissau of West Africa.
The show identified her great-great-grandparents as William and Elsie Washington, who had acquired property in northern Florida in 1873, and mentions they were among a very small number of black people who became landowners through homesteading in the years following the Civil War. The show also mentions that her grandparents were living in Harlem, and that her grandfather was working as a Pullman porter.
In the 1970s, Goldberg moved to San Diego, California, where she became a waitress, then to Berkeley, where she worked odd jobs, including as a bank teller, a mortuary cosmetologist, and a bricklayer. She joined the avant-garde theater troupe the Blake Street Hawkeyes and gave comedy and acting classes; Courtney Love was one of her acting students.
Goldberg was also in a number of theater productions. In 1978, she witnessed a midair collision of two planes in San Diego, causing her to develop a fear of flying and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Career
1980s: Early work and recognition
Goldberg trained under acting teacher Uta Hagen at the HB Studio in New York City. She first appeared onscreen in Citizen: I'm Not Losing My Mind, I'm Giving It Away (1982), an avant-garde ensemble feature by San Francisco filmmaker William Farley.
In 1983 and 1984, she "first came to national prominence with her one-woman show" in which she portrayed Moms Mabley, Moms, first performed in Berkeley, California, and then at the Victoria Theatre in San Francisco; the Oakland Museum of California preserves a poster advertising the show.
She created The Spook Show, a one-woman show composed of different character monologues in 1983. Director Mike Nichols "discovered" her when he saw her perform. In an interview, he recalled that he "burst into tears", and that he and Goldberg "fell into each other's arms" when they first met backstage. Goldberg considered Nichols her mentor.
Nichols helped her transfer the show to Broadway, where it was retitled Whoopi Goldberg. The show ran from October 24, 1984, to March 10, 1985, and was taped and broadcast by HBO as Whoopi Goldberg: Direct from Broadway. The recording of the special was awarded the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album, making Goldberg the first Black female comedian to win the Grammy.
Goldberg's Broadway performance caught the eye of director Steven Spielberg while she performed in The Belly Room at The Comedy Store. Spielberg gave her the lead role in his film The Color Purple, based on the novel by Alice Walker. It was released in late 1985, and was a critical and commercial success. Film critic Roger Ebert described Goldberg's performance as "one of the most amazing debut performances in movie history".
It was nominated for 11 Academy Awards, including a nomination for Goldberg as Best Actress. She won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture โ Drama for her portrayal of Celie, becoming the first Black actress to win in this category.
Between 1985 and 1988, Goldberg was the busiest female star, making seven films. She starred in Penny Marshall's directorial debut Jumpin' Jack Flash (1986) and began a relationship with David Claessen, a director of photography on the set; they married later that year. The film was a modest success, and during the next two years, three additional motion pictures featured Goldberg: Burglar (1987), Fatal Beauty (1987), and The Telephone (1988).
Though they were not as successful, Goldberg garnered awards from the NAACP Image Awards. Goldberg and Claessen divorced after the poor box office performance of The Telephone, in which she was contracted to perform. She tried unsuccessfully to sue the film's producers. Clara's Heart (1988) did poorly at the box office, though her own performance was critically acclaimed.
She made a guest appearance in Michael Jackson's short film for the song "Liberian Girl". As the 1980s concluded, she hosted numerous HBO specials of Comic Relief with fellow comedians Robin Williams and Billy Crystal.
1990s: Mainstream breakthrough
In January 1990, Goldberg starred with Jean Stapleton in the situation comedy Bagdad Cafe (inspired by the 1987 film of the same name). The sitcom ran for two seasons on CBS. Simultaneously, she starred in The Long Walk Home, portraying a woman in the US civil rights movement. She played a psychic in the film Ghost (1990) and became the first black woman to win the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in nearly 50 years, and the second black woman to win an Academy Award for acting (the first being Hattie McDaniel for Gone with the Wind in 1940).
She also won the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role and the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress โ Motion Picture. Premiere named her character Oda Mae Brown in its list of Top 100 best film characters.
Goldberg starred in Soapdish (1991) and had a recurring role on Star Trek: The Next Generation between 1988 and 1993 as Guinan, a character she reprised in two Star Trek films. She made a cameo in the Traveling Wilburys 1991 music video "Wilbury Twist". On May 29, 1992, the film Sister Act was released.
It grossed well over US$200 million (equivalent to $459 million in 2025), and Goldberg was nominated for a Golden Globe Award. That year, she starred in The Player and Sarafina! She also hosted the 34th Annual Grammy Awards, receiving praise from the Sun-Sentinel's Deborah Wilker for bringing to life what Wilker considered "stodgy and stale" ceremonies.
During the next year, Goldberg hosted a late-night talk show, The Whoopi Goldberg Show, and starred in two more films: Made in America and Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit. With an estimated salary of $7โ12 million for Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit (1993), she was the highest-paid actress at the time.
From 1994 to 1995, she appeared in Corrina, Corrina, The Lion King (voice), Theodore Rex, The Little Rascals, The Pagemaster (voice), Boys on the Side, and Moonlight and Valentino, and guest-starred on Muppets Tonight in 1996.
In 1994, Goldberg became the first black woman to host the Academy Awards ceremony starting with the 66th Oscar telecast. She hosted it again in 1996, 1999, and 2002, and has been regarded as one of the show's best hosts. Goldberg starred in four motion pictures in 1996: Bogus (with Gรฉrard 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, she began dating co-star Frank Langella, a relationship that lasted until early 2000. In October 1997, she and ghostwriter Daniel Paisner cowrote Book, a collection featuring Goldberg's insights and opinions. Also in 1996, Goldberg replaced Nathan Lane as Pseudolus in the Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim's musical comedy A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.
Greg Evans of Variety regarded her "thoroughly modern style" as "a welcome invitation to a new audience that could find this 1962 musical as dated as ancient Rome". The Washington Post's Chip Crews deemed Goldberg "a pip and a pro", and that she "ultimately [...] steers the show past its rough spots".
From 1998 to 2001, Goldberg took supporting roles in How Stella Got Her Groove Back with Angela Bassett, Girl, Interrupted with Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie, Kingdom Come, and Rat Race with an all-star ensemble cast. She starred in the ABC versions of Cinderella and A Knight in Camelot.
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 four Emmy Awards. She left the series in 2002. In 1999, she voiced Ransome in the British animated children's show Foxbusters by Cosgrove Hall Films.
AC Nielsen EDI ranked her as the actress appearing in the most theatrical films in the 1990s, with 29 films grossing $1.3 billion in the U.S. and Canada (equivalent to $2 billion in 2025).
2000s: Established actor and career expansion
Goldberg performed the role of Califia, the Queen of the Island of California, for a theater presentation called Golden Dreams at Disney California Adventure Park, the second gate at the Disneyland Resort, in 2000. The show, which explains the history of the Golden State (California), opened on February 8, 2001, with the rest of the park. Golden Dreams closed in September 2008 to make way for the upcoming Little Mermaid ride planned for DCA. In 2001, Goldberg co-hosted the 50th Anniversary of I Love Lucy.
In 2001, Goldberg hosted the documentary short The Making of A Charlie Brown Christmas and later portrayed Death in Monkeybone. In 2003, she returned to television in Whoopi, which was canceled after one season. On her 46th birthday, she was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She also appeared alongside Samuel L.
Jackson and Angela Bassett in the HBO documentary Unchained Memories (2003), narrating slave narratives. During the next two years, she became a spokeswoman for the dietary supplement company Slim Fast and produced two television series: Lifetime's original drama Strong Medicine, which ran six seasons; and Whoopi's Littleburg, a children's television series on Nickelodeon.
In 2002, Goldberg completed the EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony Awards) when she received the Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Special Class Special as a producer of Beyond Tara: The Extraordinary Life of Hattie McDaniel and the Tony Award for Best Musical for producing Thoroughly Modern Millie. She is the first Black woman to be an EGOT recipient.
Goldberg returned to the stage in 2003, starring as blues singer Ma Rainey in the Broadway revival of August Wilson's historical drama Ma Rainey's Black Bottom at the Royale Theatre. She was also one of the show's producers.
Goldberg was involved in controversy at a fundraiser for John Kerry at Radio City Music Hall in New York in July 2004 when she made a sexual joke about President George W. Bush by waving a bottle of wine, pointed toward her pubic area, and said, "We should keep Bush where he belongs, and not in the White House." As result, Slim-Fast dropped her from their ad campaign.
Later that year, she revived her one-woman show at the Lyceum Theatre on Broadway in honor of its 20th anniversary; Charles Isherwood of The New York Times called the opening night performance an "intermittently funny but sluggish evening of comic portraiture". Goldberg made guest appearances on Everybody Hates Chris as elderly character Louise Clarkson.
In July 2006, Goldberg became the main host of the Universal Studios Hollywood Studio Tour, in which she appears multiple times in video clips shown to the guests on monitors placed on the trams. From August 2006 to March 2008, Goldberg hosted Wake Up with Whoopi, a nationally syndicated morning radio talk and entertainment program.
In October 2007, Goldberg announced on the air that she was going to retire from acting because she was no longer sent scripts, saying, "You know, there's no room for the very talented Whoopi. There's no room right now in the marketplace of cinema". On December 13, 2008, she guest starred on The Naked Brothers Band, a Nickelodeon rock- mockumentary television series.
Before the episode premiered, on February 18, 2008, the band performed on The View and the band members were interviewed by Goldberg and Sherri Shepherd. That same year, Goldberg hosted 62nd Tony Awards.
Goldberg made a guest appearance on the situation comedy 30 Rock during the series' fourth season, in which she played herself, counseling Tracy Jordan on winning the "EGOT", the coveted combination of Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony Awards. On July 14, 2008, Goldberg announced on The View that from July 29 to September 7, she would perform in the Broadway musical Xanadu.
On November 13, 2008, Goldberg's birthday, she announced live on The View that she would be producing, along with Stage Entertainment, the premiere of Sister Act: The Musical at the London Palladium.
๐ Source: Wikipedia
