WHOOPI GOLDBERG
| Whoopi Goldberg
|
1950- | actress, comedian, LD
Whoopi's real name is Caryn Johnson. She has been performing in front of audiences since the age of 8, when she first appeared onstage at the Helena Rubinstein Children's Theatre in New York City. By the mid-1970s, the high school dropout and self-proclaimed hippie had appeared in the choruses of several Broadway musicals (Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar, and Pippin); married and become addicted to heroin; divorced and kicked her heroin habit. In 1974, Johnson, destined for far greater things, headed to L.A., with daughter Alexandra in tow. A week-long sojourn to San Diego turned into a six-year stopover, during which time she helped found the San Diego Repertory Theatre and joined several struggling improvisational troupes. It was during the San Diego chapter of her life that Johnson chose for herself an offbeat stage name: "The name came out of the blue. It was a joke. First it was Whoopi Cushion. Then it was French, like Whoopi Cushon. My mother said, 'Nobody's gonna respect you with a name like that.' So I put Goldberg on it." Goldberg toiled as a bricklayer, bank teller, and funeral parlor cosmetician to support herself. The inimitable mimic slowly developed a brilliant seriocomic narrative theater based on a gallery of socially disinherited characters through whom she assessed the world. While performing her solo comic Spook Show, she was discovered by director Mike Nichols, who mounted her eponymous one-woman Broadway show in 1984. The following year, she made a dazzling dramatic film debut in The Color Purple, a performance that earned her the Best Actress Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination. A fixture in the firmament of media fame from then on, the dreadlocked comedienne continued to appear live, joined the cast of television's Star Trek: The Next Generation. Many of her film endeavors are — Burglar, Fatal Beauty, Homer and Eddie, 1990's Ghost. Sister Act (1991), National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon, Ghosts of Mississippi,Girl, Interrupted, Star Trek: Generations, Boys on the Side, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, and The Deep End of the Ocean. Goldberg filed an interesting chapter in her career in 1998, when she returned to the small screen to take center square in the new syndicated version of The Hollywood Squares. |
