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Whoopi Goldberg - Biography

Actress. Born Caryn Johnson, on November 13, 1949, in New York, educated at the High School for Performing Arts. Exuberant, animated Black serio-comic star of the American stage, TV and films. On stage from age eight, she appeared in New York area productions and played small roles in Broadway musicals before moving to the West Coast in 1974. She performed with various drama and improvisation troupes in San Diego and San Francisco, then scored a personal hit in the one-woman "Spook Show" with which she toured the U.S. and Europe. Following a triumphant appearance on Broadway in 1984, she made a sensational screen debut in Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple (1985) in a moving performance that earned her an Academy Award nomination. Most of her subsequent film roles were in the broad comedy vein. She won an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress for Ghost (1990). In 1990 she co-starred in the TV comedy series "Bagdad Café".

The phenomenal, surprising success of the featherweight Sister Act, in 1991, led to a reported (and unheard of) $8-million return engagement in the sequel. Goldberg's projects since then have been a mixed bag of misses and hits, with clunkers like National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon, Eddie, and the appropriately titled Bogus being counterbalanced with crowd-pleasers like Star Trek: Generations, Boys on the Side, and Moonlight and Valentino. She most recently appeared in Rob Reiner's Ghosts of Mississippi.

Whoopi's private life includes a Martha Stewartesque Vermont farm to which she retreated when her unlikely affair with Cheers star Ted Danson broke up his longtime marriage. Danson donned blackface at her Friar's Club roast in 1993, and both his lame, racist jokes and their relationship fizzled. In 1994 and 1996, Whoopi served as host of the Oscars, and it was clear that in just ten years, Goldberg had assumed a unique position in the Hollywood hierarchy.