Whoopi Goldberg

Whoopi Goldberg

Caryn Elaine Johnson, known as Whoopi Goldberg, is an American actor, comedian, author, and television personality. She is one of sixteen entertainers to have won an Emmy Award, a Grammy Award, an Academy Award, and a Tony Award. Her stage forename was taken from a whoopee cushion. She has co-hosted and moderated the talk show The View since 2007.

About Whoopi Goldberg in brief

Summary Whoopi GoldbergCaryn Elaine Johnson, known as Whoopi Goldberg, is an American actor, comedian, author, and television personality. She is one of sixteen entertainers to have won an Emmy Award, a Grammy Award, an Academy Award, and a Tony Award. Her film breakthrough came in 1985 for her role as Celie, a mistreated woman in the Deep South, in Steven Spielberg’s period drama film The Color Purple. Her stage forename was taken from a whoopee cushion. She has co-hosted and moderated the talk show The View since 2007, for which she won a Daytime Emmy Award. Goldberg is of 92 percent sub-Saharan African origin and of 8 percent European origin. Her more recent forebears migrated north from Faceville, Georgia; Palatka, Florida; and Virginia. 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. Goldberg has described her mother as a \”stern, strong, and wise woman\” who raised her as a single mother with her brother Clyde. She attended a local Catholic school, St Columba’s, when she was younger. She dropped out of Washington Irving High School. Her mother, Emma Johnson, thought that the family’s original surname was ‘not Jewish enough’ for her daughter to become a star. In the 1970s, Goldberg worked as a bank teller, mortuary teller and a bricklayer.

There, she also joined the avant-garde theater troupe Citizen Hagen. In 1978, she witnessed a midair collision of planes in San Diego causing her to develop a fear of flying and PTSD. She appeared on Star Trek: The Next Generation as Guinan in 1978. She was one of one of the first women to appear in a number of theater productions in New York City in the 1980s. She also appeared on Broadway in the musical Thoroughly Modern Millie. In 1992, Goldberg starred in the comedy Sister Act, earning a third Golden Globe nomination, her first for Best Actress – Motion Picture Comedy or Musical. She reprised the role in Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit, making her the highest-paid actress at the time. In 2011, she said in 2011, ‘Goldberg is my name, it’s part of my family,part of my heritage. Just like being black\”, and \”I just know I am Jewish. I don’t go to temple, but I do remember the holidays’ She has stated that people would say ‘Come on, are you Jewish?’ And I always say ‘Would you ask me that if I was white? I bet not. ‘\” She has said that she has no known German or Jewish ancestry, and that none of her ancestors were named Goldberg. Her admixture test indicates that all of Goldberg’s traceable ancestors were African Americans, that she doesn’t know if she is Jewish, or if she has any Jewish heritage.