FAMOUS FACES IN GLASGOW! WHOOPI WOWS MAYFEST IN 80S GLASGOW VISIT
Sister Act star earned stunning show review
SHE is now an Oscarwinning actor, famous the world over for powerful, funny and moving roles in a string of hit films. But back in 1984, Whoopi Goldberg was far from being a household name – it would be another year before she got her big break – and first Academy Award nomination – in The Color Purple, the movie based on Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.
Our photographers snapped her with colleague David Schein, outside what was then called The Third Eye Centre (now the Centre for Contemporary Arts) on Sauchiehall Street.
Both were in town to perform at Mayfest, the city-wide spring arts festival ran for years.
(The tickets for Whoopi’s solo show cost just a couple of pounds – try seeing her on stage now for that kind of money...)
The Evening Times’s sister newspaper The Herald gave Whoopi a glowing review. which many
“Goldberg presents a variety of hauntingly vulnerable characters conjuring up en route delightful images,” wrote their esteemed art critic Dominic D’Angelo.
“What is most poignant is her characters’ credibility.”
Each year Mayfest brightened up Glasgow with a diverse range of arts, drama and community events in venues all over the city.
(That same day in May 1984, for example, also saw Billy Liar, at the King’s Theatre; Shanghai’d, by Borderline Theatre Company, at the Mitchell Theatre, Adam McNaughton at the Star Club, and the classical Trio Cannello at the Winter Gardens in the People’s Palace.)
Whoopi may have been a hit in Glasgow, but her star was yet to rise globally, and that following year, it did.
As well as the Oscar nomination for The Color Purple, she won a Golden Globe for her role in the period drama, and it led to huge success.
She won an Oscar for the box office smash Ghost in 1990, then enchanted a whole new generation of Star Trek fans with her roles on the TV series, Star Trek: The Next Generation.
With the fish-out-of-water caper comedy Sister Act in 1992, in which she played a disco diva who hides in a convent disguised as a nun after witnessing a murder, she scored another hit and she followed it up with a series of successful comedies, including Made in America,
Soapdish and a follow up to the original, Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit.
She was due to reprise her starring role as Deloris Van Cartier on stage in a new production of Sister Act, before the pandemic struck.
Whoopi had briefly appeared in that role at the London Palladium in 2010.
Born Caryn Elaine Johnson in Manhattan in November 1955, Whoopi was the daughter of a Baptist clergyman and a nurse.
She dropped out of school, and did a series of odd jobs, including bank teller, a mortuary cosmetologist, and a bricklayer before discovering her love of, and talent for, acting.
Did you see Whoopi in Glasgow? Do you remember Mayfest? Which stars have you seen in Glasgow before they were famous?
Get in touch with your memories and old photos.