Whoopi Goldberg

Whoopi Goldberg, born Caryn Elaine Johnson, made her film debut at thirty as Celie in The Color Purple in 1985 and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for it, along with her first Golden Globe. Very few careers open at that altitude, and Hollywood then spent five years failing to work out what to do with her, handing her a run of thin comedies and thrillers that wasted a considerable talent.

Ghost fixed that in 1990. Oda Mae Brown is the part that shows exactly what she can do: she is the funniest person in the film and its most sincere, and she moves between the two without a visible gear change, which is far harder than it looks. It won her a second Golden Globe and the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Sister Act and its sequel followed, and Guinan on Star Trek: The Next Generation gave her the other half of her range, a listener whose authority comes entirely from stillness.

She is one of twenty-eight people to hold the EGOT, with an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony. Her other honours include a BAFTA, two Golden Globes, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2001, the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 2010 and the Disney Legend Award in 2017. Since the late nineties her centre of gravity has been television, first producing and hosting Hollywood Squares and then moderating The View, work that has made her far more famous as a personality than as the actress who carried The Color Purple.