Whoopi Goldberg

Whoopi Goldberg, born Caryn Elaine Johnson on November 13, 1955, in Manhattan, New York City, is an American actor, comedian, author, television personality, and Broadway performer and book writer. The daughter of Emma Johnson, a nurse and teacher, and Robert James Johnson Jr., a Baptist clergyman, she grew up in the Chelsea-Elliot Houses, a public housing project in New York City, where her mother raised her and her brother Clyde as a single parent. She attended St. Columba's parochial school in Manhattan before dropping out of Washington Irving High School. Her family heritage, as she has described it, encompasses Jewish, Buddhist, Baptist, and Catholic traditions. A 2006 PBS documentary, African American Lives, traced part of her ancestry through DNA testing to the Papel and Bayote peoples of present-day Guinea-Bissau, and identified her great-great-grandparents, William and Elsie Washington, as among a small number of Black landowners who acquired property in northern Florida in 1873 through homesteading in the years following the Civil War.

In the 1970s, Goldberg relocated to San Diego, California, where she worked as a waitress, and later to Berkeley, where she held a variety of jobs including bank teller, mortuary cosmetologist, and bricklayer. During this period she joined the avant-garde theater troupe the Blake Street Hawkeyes and taught comedy and acting classes, with Courtney Love among her students. She also trained under acting teacher Uta Hagen at the HB Studio in New York City. In 1983, she created The Spook Show, a one-woman show built from character monologues, which she first performed in Berkeley and later at the Victoria Theatre in San Francisco. Director Mike Nichols saw her perform and became her mentor, helping her transfer the show to Broadway, where it was retitled Whoopi Goldberg and ran from October 24, 1984, to March 10, 1985. HBO taped and broadcast the production as Whoopi Goldberg: Direct from Broadway, and the recording received the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album, making Goldberg the first Black female comedian to win that award. The Drama Desk Award for Outstanding One Person Show followed in 1985.

Her Broadway debut brought her to the attention of director Steven Spielberg, who cast her in the lead role of Celie in his 1985 period drama The Color Purple, based on Alice Walker's novel. The film earned eleven Academy Award nominations, including a Best Actress nomination for Goldberg, and she won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama, becoming the first Black actress to win in that category. In 1990, her portrayal of an eccentric psychic in the romantic fantasy film Ghost earned her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, making her the second African-American woman to win an Oscar. She went on to star in the comedy Sister Act in 1992 and its sequel Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit in 1993, becoming the highest-paid actress at the time. Her additional film credits include Jumpin' Jack Flash (1986), Clara's Heart (1988), Soapdish (1991), Corrina, Corrina (1994), Ghosts of Mississippi (1996), Girl, Interrupted (1999), and Till (2022), as well as voice roles in The Lion King (1994) and Toy Story 3 (2010).

On Broadway, Goldberg's career spans 1984 to 2024 and encompasses a range of roles and productions. Beyond her one-woman show, she appeared in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, August Wilson's play, and in the musical Funny Girl, as well as in Annie and Children and Art, among other productions. She also starred in the Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim's A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. As a producer, she won the Tony Award for Best Musical in 2002 for Thoroughly Modern Millie, accompanied by the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding New Musical that same year. She received a third Tony Award nomination in 2011 for the stage adaptation of Sister Act.

On television, Goldberg portrayed the character Guinan in Star Trek: The Next Generation from 1988 to 1993 and reprised the role in Star Trek: Picard in 2022. Since 2007, she has co-hosted and moderated the daytime talk show The View, a role for which she won the Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Talk Show Host. She has hosted the Academy Awards ceremony four times. In 2001, she received the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. The combination of her Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony wins places her among the rare group of performers to have achieved the EGOT.