Movies Were Better When Whoopi Was in Them
Taking stock of her indelible roles
for a solid decade, Whoopi Goldberg was the funniest woman in America. Along with her two best friends in Hollywood— Billy Crystal and Robin Williams—she ruled the 1990s and, in so doing, expanded notions of what a Black woman could be in Hollywood. Whenever the three appeared onstage together, it was appointment TV. They had chemistry as a trio of troublemakers: Crystal the wisecracker; Williams the frenetic, unpredictable master of impressions; and Goldberg the crackling, mischievous wit who had everyone’s number and wasn’t afraid to use it. The Clintons, Heidi Fleiss, Bob Dole—you name ’em, she had a joke about ’em.
Goldberg is the recipient of this year’s Vulture Festival honorary degree, an award recognizing those who have made an enduring mark on the culture. One need only tumble down the YouTube archive of her career to marvel at the stage presence of a dreadlocked woman with no eyebrows who held Hollywood in the palm of her hand every time she hosted the Oscars. She was the cool girl, born Caryn Elaine Johnson and raised in New York, who actually got to do things her way, up to a point. On paper, it’s difficult to quantify what made Goldberg, now 64, such a star. She was prolific and often the centerpiece of movies that would likely not stand up to the tastes of a more demanding 2020 audience. Remember Corrina, Corrina, in which she played a maid helping a little white girl and her father grieve the loss of their homemaker mother while falling in love and fixing racism? How about Ghost, where she’s the “Magical Negro” to a dead Patrick Swayze? Or Clara’s Heart, in which she’s the Jamaican helpmeet to a rich white family?
Perhaps those projects elicit grimaces as a whole, but more often than not, Goldberg made them sing, especially if they required a rapid-fire delivery of dialogue when she got good and revved up to chew someone out. She was a singular talent in a business that didn’t know what to do with actresses after they turned 40 and really didn’t know what to do with a dark-skinned Black woman who defied white beauty standards when Black actresses who looked like Halle Berry and Vanessa Williams were in vogue. That singularity is evident in her egot status; she’s the only Black woman to have nabbed each of the major award statues. What she apparently lacked in lighter skin and straight hair, she more than made up for with comic smarts and an undeniable screen presence that sprouted from that signature, cigarette-flecked rasp of a voice.
The true pearl of all her onscreen efforts is her breakout role as Celie Johnson in The Color Purple. It’s one of the few films to marshal the potential that came bursting through her 1985 one-woman show, Whoopi Goldberg: Direct From Broadway, in which she moved through a menagerie of characters: a Valley girl, a drug-addicted thief, a Black girl who hasn’t yet discovered the gems within herself and so pretends to be blonde and white by throwing a towel over her head. In The Color Purple, Goldberg deploys that skill to create a character who withdraws deeper into herself to dissociate from her husband’s abuse. It is literally the story of a woman discovering her voice after being told that she’s worthless and that her worthlessness is a direct result of being born a Black woman. At the film’s turning point, the light begins to shine within Celie when Mister’s girlfriend, Shug Avery (Margaret Avery), turns her kindness to Celie. It’s a scene that relies on Goldberg’s control; a slow, shy smile creeps onto her face, and her instinct is to hide it behind her hand because the warmth and glow of Shug’s attention is almost too much to bear. That scene alone should have won her the Oscar, but instead she won it for playing Oda Mae Brown in Ghost. In a just world, where actresses weren’t given a Last Fuckable Day expiration date, Goldberg’s memorable film work would have extended into the 2000s. Still, that rasp, those locs, that wit—they’re indelible. ■