Whoopi Goldberg never threw away her old welfare cards. She framed them, and her daughter, Alex Martin Dean, mentioned them almost in passing when she told theGrio in 2015 about growing up on public assistance. “I know what it’s like with the food stamps, because my mom has her cards framed,” Alex said. “I remember that.”
The woman who kept those cards turns 71 today, Friday, November 13. She was born Caryn Elaine Johnson on that date in 1955 in Manhattan, and long before the Oscar and the moderator’s chair on The View, she was a young single mother raising a little girl on almost nothing. That little girl made her a grandmother at 34, and decades later Alex finally told her mother why she had started a family so young.
How Did Caryn Johnson Become Whoopi Goldberg?
Caryn grew up in the Chelsea projects with her mother, Emma, and her older brother, and she left high school before finishing. TIME reported in 1992 that she “messed around with drugs” in that era “the way everyone did then,” and she has since described herself as having once been a “functioning” addict. She married Alvin Martin, a drug counselor, in 1973, and their daughter Alexandrea was born soon after.
The marriage didn’t last, and she ended up on welfare in San Diego before moving north to Berkeley. She laid bricks and did makeup at a mortuary to get by. Even when she earned a few dollars from a stage job, she reported every cent to the welfare office and watched it come out of her next check. She explained why to TIME: “I didn’t want my daughter seeing Mom lying.”
The name came out of those early comedy days, too. Fellow performers kept comparing her to a whoopee cushion, and in her 2024 memoir, Bits and Pieces, she wrote that she first wanted to bill herself as “Whoopi Cushione” with a French accent until her mother talked her out of it. The Goldberg part was never a joke to her. “Goldberg is my name,” she has said. “It’s part of my family, part of my heritage, just like being black.”
Then a famous director walked into a small New York theater, and the welfare years were about to end.
What Happened After Mike Nichols Saw Her Show?
Goldberg had built a one-woman act called The Spook Show, and in 1983 Mike Nichols caught it at the Dance Theater Workshop. He brought it to Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre in October 1984, and the recording of that show won her a Grammy for Best Comedy Recording.
Steven Spielberg cast her as Celie in The Color Purple in 1985, her first major film role, and it earned her a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination for Best Actress. Five years later she played Oda Mae Brown, the phony psychic who suddenly hears a real ghost in Ghost, and in March 1991 she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. “Ever since I was a little kid, I wanted this,” she said from the stage, as Essence later recalled. She was the first Black actress to win an acting Oscar since Hattie McDaniel for Gone with the Wind half a century earlier.
In 2002 she won a Daytime Emmy for hosting a documentary about McDaniel’s life, and that same year she picked up a Tony as a producer of the Best Musical Thoroughly Modern Millie, which completed her EGOT. She became moderator of The View in September 2007 and still holds the seat. On November 3, she told viewers she’d been “kicked out” of the Democratic Party two decades ago, TV Insider reported, while the panel was debating the midterm elections.
All that success came with a cost at home, and Goldberg has been unusually honest about who paid it.
What Did Fame Cost Her At Home?
As her career took off, Goldberg was often away, and her mother, Emma, did much of the day-to-day caring for Alex. According to coverage of Bits and Pieces, it was Emma who stood beside Alex when she gave birth to her first child in November 1989, while Alex was still a high school student.
The baby, Amarah Skye, arrived on November 13, 1989, which was Whoopi’s 34th birthday. Both Hollywood Life and ScreenRant have noted that the grandmother and granddaughter share the date, so today Amarah turns 37 alongside her.
The family grew again in March 2014 when Amarah had a daughter, Charli Rose, and Goldberg became a great-grandmother at 58. UPI reported her delight at being back on bottle duty. “I’m doing something I probably haven’t done in forty years,” she said. “I’m actually feeding [her].”
Amarah has stayed close enough that she checked with her grandmother before joining ABC’s Claim to Fame in 2022. “Her approval always matters to me,” she told ScreenRant, though her grandmother at first suspected the show was fake. “I see her every day. If I don’t see her, it’s definitely a call or text.”
What Goldberg didn’t know for years was what had been going through her daughter’s mind back in 1989.
Why Did Her Daughter Have A Baby So Young?
Only much later did Alex offer an explanation, and Goldberg put it in her memoir. “Years later, Alexandrea told me that she thinks she got pregnant as teenager because she wanted one person in her life who didn’t know who Whoopi Goldberg was,” she wrote, as TODAY reported in 2024.
Goldberg didn’t argue with it. “I thought she was getting revenge on me for being gone so much,” she admitted in Bits and Pieces. “I got it.”
The hurt didn’t harden into distance. Alex and her mother walked the red carpet together at the 2025 Oscars and again this past summer for the opening of The Whoopi Monologues, a night we covered here. On The View in 2016, Goldberg called Alex “one of the most trustworthy and loyal people I know,” and added, “I just like her a lot.”
The baby Alex wanted for herself, the one person who wouldn’t see a movie star, shares Whoopi’s birthday today. Amarah, for her part, describes her famous grandmother in the plainest terms. “Me and my grandma are super close,” she said, in words TODAY quoted. “She’s everything.”
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