Early Life
Goldberg was born Caryn Elaine Johnson in Manhattan and raised in the Chelsea neighborhood, the daughter of Emma (née Harris), a nurse and teacher, and Robert James Johnson, Jr., a clergyman. Goldberg has described her mother as a "stern, strong, and wise woman" who raised her as a single mother after Goldberg's father had left the family. Goldberg's recent ancestors migrated north from Faceville, Georgia, Palatka, Florida, and Virginia. Results of 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. Her admixture test indicates that she is 92 percent of sub-Saharan African origin and 8 percent of European origin.
Her stage name, Whoopi, was taken from a whoopee cushion; she has stated that "If you get a little gassy, you've got to let it go. So people used to say to me, 'You're like a whoopee cushion.' And that's where the name came from." She adopted the traditionally German/Jewish surname Goldberg as a stage name because her mother felt the original surname of Johnson was not "Jewish enough" to make her a star. According to an anecdote told by Nichelle Nichols in the documentary film Trekkies, a young Goldberg was watching Star Trek, and upon seeing Nichols' character Uhura, exclaimed, "Momma! There's a black lady on TV and she ain't no maid!" This spawned lifelong fandom of Star Trek for Goldberg, who would eventually accept a recurring guest-starring role on Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Between the years of 1979 and 1981, she lived in socialist East Germany, working in a number of theater productions. During her travels, she would smuggle various items into the country for the artists she stayed with.
Read more about this topic: Whoopi Goldberg
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Today’s pressures on middle-class children to grow up fast begin in early childhood. Chief among them is the pressure for early intellectual attainment, deriving from a changed perception of precocity. Several decades ago precocity was looked upon with great suspicion. The child prodigy, it was thought, turned out to be a neurotic adult; thus the phrase “early ripe, early rot!””
—David Elkind (20th century)
“Your home is regarded as a model home, your life as a model life. But all this splendor, and you along with it ... it’s just as though it were built upon a shifting quagmire. A moment may come, a word can be spoken, and both you and all this splendor will collapse.”
—Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906)