While performing her solo comic Spook Show, Whoopi was discovered by director Mike Nichols, who mounted her eponymous one-woman Broadway show in 1984. The following year, she made a dazzling dramatic film debut in The Color Purple, a performance that earned her the Best Actress Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination. A fixture in the firmament of media fame from then on, the dreadlocked comedienne continued to appear live, joined the cast of television's Star Trek: The Next Generation, launched both a short-lived sitcom called Bagdad Cafe and a late-night talk show (also short-lived), and tackled numerous movie roles. Sadly, many of her film endeavors — Burglar, Fatal Beauty, Homer and Eddie, to name but a few — squandered her monolithic talent, but Goldberg scored an unqualified hit and a Best Supporting Actress Oscar with her portrayal of a garishly dressed medium in 1990's Ghost. The phenomenal, surprising success of the featherweight Sister Act (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 films like National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon, Bogus, Ghosts of Mississippi, and theWinona Ryder-produced memoir adaptation Girl, Interrupted being counterbalanced with crowd-pleasers like Star Trek: Generations, Boys on the Side, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, and The Deep End of the Ocean. Goldberg filed an interesting chapter in her career in 1998, when she returned to the small screen to take center square in the new syndicated version of The Hollywood Squares.
Whoopi Goldberg