Before reaching Hollywood’s A-list and starring in iconic films and TV series, Whoopi Goldberg worked a variety of odd jobs on her path to fame.
Years before her iconic role as psychic Oda-Mae Brown in the 1990 film “Ghost,” Goldberg worked as a hair and makeup artist at a funeral home in the 1970s. Living in San Diego at the time, she also held jobs as a bank teller and a bricklayer before pursuing acting.
She told Oprah’s Master Class in 2015: “I did hair and makeup on dead people. There was an ad in the paper! And I’m a licensed beautician as well, because I went to beauty school.
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“It’s a rough gig. You have to be a certain kind of person. And you have to love people in order to make them worthy of a great send-off.”
The Oscar-winning actress recently revealed that she and her late brother, Clyde, spread their mother’s ashes on the It’s a Small World ride shortly after she died in 2010.
“No one should do this. Don’t do it,” Goldberg, 68, cautioned during the July 10 episode of “Late Night with Seth Meyers.” “She loved Small World. So, in the Small World ride, periodically, I’d scoop some of her up and I’d do this poof, and I said, ‘My God, this cold is getting worse and worse!’ And then we got over to the flowers where it says, ‘Disneyland’ and I was like, ‘Oh, look at that! Poof.’”
In July 2023, Goldberg also expressed her own preference for cremation during an episode of “The View,” envisioning her remains as “dust in the wind.”
“I’m going to be going around the world, I’m going to be everywhere. I might be in your backyard – I don’t know,” the moderator said. “I don’t want people to feel obligated to come to the cemetery. If you want to remember me, remember me.”
When co-host Joy Behar asked if she cares how she is portrayed after death, Goldberg replied: “I don’t want to be a hologram. That’s been in my will for 15 years.”
