Featured Image Credit: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for Tribeca Festival
Topics: Whoopi Goldberg, The View, Hollywood, Film and TV, Entertainment, Celebrity
Ellie Kemp
Topics: Whoopi Goldberg, The View, Hollywood, Film and TV, Entertainment, Celebrity
Whoopi Goldberg has long been a fixture of Hollywood royalty, but her iconic name isn’t quite what it seems.
The highly-decorated actress - one of only 22 to win all four major US awards; a Primetime Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony - has graced screen and stage for more than four decades.
Known for movies including Sister Act, Ghost and The Color Purple, the 70-year-old is also a regular panelist on ABC's The View, where she recently made a candid admission about her 'hit-and-run' love life.
But the megastar's real name isn't actually Whoopi Goldberg; it's something completely ordinary, and she has an unusual story behind her famous moniker.
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The actress' real name is actually Caryn Johnson, but she decided that that wasn't going to cut it.
In her 2024 memoir, Bits and Pieces: My Mother, My Brother, and Me, Goldberg wrote: "Once I started getting parts in plays, I wanted a name that sounded more interesting. Caryn Johnson wasn’t it."
She divulged: "Some people at the Rep called me Whoopi because I would sometimes let loose with a fart." Yes, that's right... the EGOT-winning actress was inspired by her own bodily functions!
Taking it a step further, she continued: "I added 'Cush-ione' to it, with a French pronunciation. Then, I got a review written by journalist Welton Jones. It was a good one, so I sent it to my mother. Later, when we talked on the phone, she said, 'What is this Whoopi Cushione?'"
Goldberg explained it was her 'nickname,' but her late mom, Emma Harris, was less than impressed.
In 2024, Goldberg told Seth Meyers on Late Night that her mother suggested her an alternative last name.
“She said, ‘You are diminishing your abilities. If you call yourself by Whoopi Cushion, people are not really going to appreciate what you can do,'" Goldberg explained.
"And I said, ‘Oh really? Oh, great namer of the star?’ And she said, ‘Yes.’”
Goldberg, in a less exciting move, came from her family tree.
The actress explained. “[My mom] said, ‘Well, there’s a lot of family names, we’ve got a lot of different people in our family, I like Goldberg.'
“And I said, ‘Okay well we’ll try it.’"
The name, of course stuck. "That became my name. Only my family and a few people who knew me early in my life still called me Caryn," Goldberg added.
In her memoir, Goldberg explained that her mom wasn't going to give her the stage name for free.
She asked for three things in return: an English beaver bowler hat, an Ermine coat and a Bugatti.
"[The hat] had to come in the box - the leather box - with the brush," Goldberg wrote, adding her mother had 'very good taste.'
Only two of the three wishes came true, with the Bugatti left untouched since Emma couldn’t drive.
Still, Goldberg made the most of the other two.
“There’s a photograph of my mother and my daughter, and my daughter had just had her daughter, and she’s wearing her beaver bowler hat,” Whoopi recalled. “The Ermine coat, she never wanted to wear outside, she just wanted to be able to take it and drag it down the stairs like an old movie star.”