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10. Girl, Interrupted (1999)
Or: Winona, Overshadowed. Predominantly, that is, by Angelina Jolie, whose movie-stealing turn as one of Ryder’s fellow patients at a late-1960s US psychiatric hospital won her an Oscar. Don’t discount Goldberg’s contribution, though. Soothingly understated as Valerie, the chief nurse, she and fellow staff members, played by Vanessa Redgrave and Jeffrey Tambor, provide the emotional grounding over which their younger co-stars (also including Elisabeth Moss and Brittany Murphy) can soar.
9. Made in America (1993)
Goldberg is the owner of an African bookstore whose daughter (Nia Long) tracks down her sperm-donor father (Ted Danson). It’s hate at first sight for the parents, but antipathy turns to amorousness. Despite plenty of histrionics, and some regrettable slapstick involving a runaway elephant, Goldberg somehow clings to her dignity. There are bizarre moments, such as Danson gazing at a photograph of his daughter as a baby and saying softly to himself: “Funny thing, sperm.” Or Goldberg commanding him to “smell me” before they first lock lips. But the smooch itself is not to be sniffed at. Even in 1993, interracial romance was all but taboo in US cinema: a love scene between Goldberg and Sam Elliott was cut from Fatal Beauty only six years earlier.
8. Boys on the Side (1995)
A sugar-and-spice road movie, the former ingredient provided by director Herbert Ross (Steel Magnolias), the latter by screenwriter Don Roos (The Opposite of Sex). Goldberg plays Jane, a musician leaving New York after breaking up with her girlfriend, and hitting the road with Robin (Mary-Louise Parker), who has HIV, and Holly (Drew Barrymore), who is fleeing an abusive relationship. This is the 1990s, so Jane can’t simply be a lesbian: her sexuality must be mulled over by the straight characters. No matter: Goldberg brings the goods.
7. The Long Walk Home (1990)
This patronising film set in 1950s Alabama is part of Goldberg’s maids-and-housekeepers trilogy (see also: Clara’s Heart and Corrina, Corrina). But she gives a fine, subtle performance as the dutiful servant in a household whose matriarch (Sissy Spacek) is only just waking up to racial inequality. Behind the scenes, Goldberg successfully fought to keep footage of her character’s family in the final cut. On screen, she deploys stoicism brilliantly, especially when waiting on a white dinner party at which the guests are openly racist. “People have told me it’s a very restrained performance,” she later said. “It’s restrained because that’s what those women had to do. They were mad, but they had to work to support their families.”
6. Monkeybone (2001)
In the role of Death, stationed behind a desk in the purgatory-like Down Town where a hapless cartoonist (Brendan Fraser) finds himself stranded, Goldberg wears an eye patch, headgear that crosses a tricorn with a stovepipe hat, and a breast pocket overstuffed with pens. It is no impediment to her duties when her head explodes: she simply demands another one be taken from the shelf, Return to Oz-style, and screwed on to her neck. An unusually wacko project for Goldberg but just another day at the office for Henry Selick, director of The Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline.
5. The Deep End of the Ocean (1999)
Michelle Pfeiffer is the distraught mother whose three-year-old son has gone missing, Goldberg the tenacious detective who sticks with the case and becomes a family friend as the years tick by. Her most complex scene occurs early on, when she recoils suddenly from Pfeiffer’s affectionate display of gratitude, then offers an explanation: “Look, I’m Black, I’m a woman, I’m a detective supervisor, and I’m gay. Did you know that? So I always feel like the eyes of Texas are on me.”
4. Sister Act (1992)
Many of Goldberg’s roles have been castoffs from other actors: Jumpin’ Jack Flash was intended for Shelley Long, Burglar for Bruce Willis, while Fatal Beauty was rejected by Cher and Tina Turner. Even Sister Act only came her way after Bette Midler turned it down. But it became her second biggest hit, grossing $231m worldwide and spawning an inferior sequel and stage version. She plays Deloris, the singer causing havoc among the wimples when she hides out in a convent after witnessing a murder. Pluses include a lively soul soundtrack (My Guy is tweaked to My God) and her rapport with the British acting legend cast as Mother Superior. “You’re Maggie Smith!” Goldberg said on the first day of shooting. “What are you doing in this fucking movie?”
3. The Color Purple (1985)
What a start: Goldberg’s Oscar-nominated movie debut, in Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Alice Walker’s novel about the woebegone lives of African American women in early 20th-century Georgia, could scarcely have been meatier. She had told Walker that she was willing to play any part, even if it was just “the dirt on the floor”, though she landed the lead role of Celie, the abused and exploited young woman who flickers to life in the company of the singer Shug (Margaret Avery), even if Spielberg goes light on the novel’s lesbianism. In fact, it is the director, tackling his first self-consciously grownup material, who feels like the tentative newcomer, while actual newbies such as Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey seem like seasoned pros. (The former has a cameo as a midwife in the 2023 version, which Winfrey produced.)
2. The Player (1992)
Robert Altman’s Hollywood satire, with Tim Robbins as Griffin Mill, the studio executive who murders a screenwriter, deploys its star wattage in stroboscopic fashion: A-listers including Julia Roberts, Bruce Willis, Cher and Susan Sarandon appear as themselves, flashing past the camera almost subliminally. Goldberg is one of the few playing a character, and she is a riot. Her sceptical, unfazed Pasadena police detective is perpetually amused by the shifty Mill, and given to blithely swinging her tampon around in front of him. Goldberg’s casting alone is a way for Altman to subversively undermine the plot’s suspense, just as he later would by hiring Stephen Fry to play the ineffectual police inspector in Gosford Park.
1. Ghost (1990)
This was the film that won Goldberg an Oscar, making her only the second Black female performer to do so (Hattie McDaniel had been the first, half a century earlier in Gone With the Wind); the prize also put her on the path to Egot (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony) status, which she finally achieved in 2002. But the role of Oda Mae Brown, the bogus medium who finds herself an unwitting conduit for the murdered Sam (Patrick Swayze) to communicate with his girlfriend Molly (Demi Moore), nearly passed her by. Auditions were already under way, with Tina Turner the clear favourite for the part, when Goldberg heard about this unlikely stew of thriller, comedy and love story, and wangled a meeting. The film’s screenwriter, Bruce Joel Rubin, was aghast: “Anybody but Whoopi,” he pleaded. Later, he ate his words: “I mistakenly thought she’d be too broad. But nobody in the movie is more perfect than her.” Indeed, Ghost would be dangerously earnest without her irreverence, vitality and nutty line readings, not least the translation of Sam’s warning into Oda Mae’s own vernacular: “Molly, you in danger, girl.”
