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Making people laugh while carrying off this kind of thing without mawkishness is close to impossible, and Whoopi did it. People left the theater feeling that they had just seen the best dramatic show on Broadway. Director Steven Spielberg was one of them, and he cast Goldberg as the farmer's ugly- duckling wife Celie in The Color Purple. She had never been on a sound stage before, but her performance turned out to be the best part of a good film. And in the next few years, in role after role, her acting was the best part of a succession of bad, mediocre and upper-mediocre films.
Such as Sister Act. Waiting for Whoopi's dangerous-to-your-health mouth to fulminate is the main plot element -- no, the sole plot element -- of this Disney no-brainer, one of those renegade-hides-out-with-cute -nuns movies that + Hollywood makes every three years. So Sister Act (which has grossed $125 million to date) has a touch of class it doesn't really deserve. So do Clara's Heart, Jumpin' Jack Flash and Ghost (for which Goldberg got the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, though she is firm in announcing that she's an actor, and never mind the feminine dismissive). She has the ability to turn a routine flick into a pretty good movie entirely on her own.
She grew up in the racially mixed Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, messed around with drugs "the way everyone did then," and by her late teens was a high school dropout ("I just wasn't cut out for it") with a broken marriage and a baby daughter. Not long afterward she was living on welfare in San Diego. But her story can't be told that quickly. She looks on her childhood as privileged. Her mother, a nurse and a Head Start teacher, was a strong woman ("Still is. She's got her foibles, but she's amazing") who would say, "Get on the bus, go hear the Leonard Bernstein concert, go see the children's ballet, go to the museum . . ." And there were old movies on TV, "though I didn't know they were old; I liked the idea of seeing Clark Gable in the war on one channel, and then switching, and he'd be riding a horse."
Most magically, there was a glorious children's theater program at the Hudson Guild, funded by Helena Rubenstein. By age eight, the not-yet Whoopi was hooked. "I could be a princess, a teapot ((she laughs at the memory)), a rabbit, anything. And in a way, it's been children's theater ever since. I've only recently begun believing that I've grown up, and acting is what I do."
Living on welfare in San Diego was demeaning, for the usual reasons. Social workers sniffed about to see whether some man was living on her allowance. When she made $25 from theater work or a few off-and-on dollars for being a cosmetician in a mortuary, she would stubbornly report the money to the welfare people "because I didn't want my daughter seeing Mom lying." The welfare people would stubbornly subtract it from her next check. "Of course by that time the theater money would be gone." She admits that the system did what it was supposed to do: it propped her up when she needed it. But dignity wasn't part of the process. "Yeah, I get pissy thinking about it, because it shouldn't be so degrading," she says now. "But I'm not bitter. That takes too much time."