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Rosie O'Donnell
Facts | Biography | Credits

OSIE O'DONNELL holds to this sacrosanct comedy maxim: she won't tell a joke if she wouldn't say it to the butt's face. In spite of that refusal to go straight for the jugular, O'Donnell's new talk-variety show, The Rosie O'Donnell Show, became a huge hit. Devoid of the tawdry moral transgressions of inbred trailer trash (who have come to dominate most daytime talk shows), the show ranked No. 1 in the lion's share of major TV markets in its first week out of the gate--no mean feat in the dead dog days of summer. Now hailed by Newsweek as "The Queen of Nice," O'Donnell is irreverent, she's gracious, she's frank, she's perky, she's brazenly hilarious without being trashy, she's . . . well . . . nice. Like Dinah Shore, only with chutzpah.
Born the middle child of five, O'Donnell was raised on Long Island. Her mother's death from cancer, when Rosie was ten years old, was the defining event of her life. Growing up in a motherless household made her long for a Julie Andrews-type lifesaver--a Mary Poppins to right all wrongs. "There were five small children and an emotionally distant father," she has said. "There was no Julie Andrews coming in. We sort of took care of ourselves and raised each other." She found solace in television--especially talk shows--and would race home from school every day to catch Merv Griffin and Mike Douglas. Rosie and her siblings had neither guidelines nor an authority figure to enforce them, and the kids pretty much ran wild; nevertheless, Rosie always got good grades and was even the senior class president and the prom queen.
O'Donnell didn't always want to be a comedienne--she dreamed from a young age of being an actress. Her idols were Barbra Streisand , Carol Burnett, Lucille Ball, and Bette Midler , and her idea of nirvana was to be Laverne on Happy Days. But she also harbored a deep appreciation for Gilda Radner, and after doing a killer impression of Radner's Rosanne Rosannadana sketch in a high school follies production, O'Donnell was encouraged to try her hand at stand-up at a local comedy club. With the "impenetrable self-confidence" of a sixteen-year-old, O'Donnell caught Jerry Seinfeld 's act on Merv Griffin's show and took the stage the next night, knocking the crowd dead with his pirated act. She was subsequently informed that other comedians' material wasn't public domain and that she would have to write her own. O'Donnell decided instead to work as an emcee, introducing other comedians with recycled Catskill riffs, while she listened to the various acts and learned.
By the age of twenty, O'Donnell had polished her act enough to take it on the road. She performed for peanuts and crashed in filthy communal condos along with an ever-changing cast of other comedians--most of them male--along the East Coast. During those early years on the club circuit, O'Donnell was alarmed by the host of vices--one-night stands, drugs, drinking--that her fellow performers indulged in nightly. Fearful of the sounds of nocturnal activity emanating from other rooms, she would barricade herself in her room at night with a dresser. At the time (the eighties), a female comedian was something of an anomaly (O'Donnell estimates she was one of about eight women doing stand-up at the time); various forms of sexism--including lower wages for female comics--were pretty much the norm. Nevertheless, O'Donnell persevered, and by the end of the decade she had succeeded (she won the Star Search competition five times) in making a career as a stand-up comedienne.
After landing a short-term assignment as Nell Carter's neighbor on the sitcom Gimme a Break, in 1986, O'Donnell was asked to produce and host Stand Up Spotlight on VH-1, which led, in turn, to her helming her own short-lived series called Stand by Your Man, on Fox, in 1992. That same year, Penny "Laverne" Marshall cast her as Madonna 's obnoxiously dear sidekick, Doris Murphy, in 1992's A League of Their Own, a film that gained O'Donnell more mainstream notice than all of her previous efforts combined. She has since excelled as the wise-cracking foil to the female leads (as Meg Ryan 's sentimental confidante in Sleepless in Seattle; as Rizzo in the 1994 Broadway revival of Grease; as Betty Rubble to Elizabeth Perkins' Wilma in The Flintstones; as Mira Sorvino's smart-mouthed hairdresser in Beautiful Girls). More often than not, she stole the scene from her more high-profile, but not necessarily more talented, co-stars.
O'Donnell opted to switch career tracks to the television industry in order to be a full-time mother to her son, Parker, whom she adopted as a newborn in 1995. One of the perks of O'Donnell's supremacy in the daytime-TV arena--apart from her four-year, $4-million contract--has been a custom-built nursery, stuffed to the bursting point with toys and adjoined to her office in NBC's Rockefeller Center headquarters. Mother and son are inseparable. Eschewing all the fuss and bother that goes with celebrity life in L.A., O'Donnell prefers the studied indifference of her fellow New Yawkers, and recently purchased Helen Hayes' former New York estate, where she will continue to raise her son without the help of a battalion of nannies that other celebrity moms engage. Somewhere in this resistance to the gaga-ism of showbiz lies the charm of Rosie O'Donnell--while she may be every inch and pound an insider (she counts among her dearest friends Madonna and Melanie Griffith , after all), she remains an Everywoman for the tens of millions of daytime TV diehards looking for someone they can relate to. It's comforting that someone of her celebrity wattage actually likes soap operas, shamelessly refers to Tom Cruise as "my boyfriend," appears in ads for K-Mart, and thinks a hot night of entertainment is playing a rousing game of Scrabble.
O'Donnell recently played the faithful nanny Golly in a film version of Harriet the Spy --now she is the Julie Andrews-esque figure to a new generation of children. In keeping with that theme is her idea for a children's musical called Double Wish (which she is trying to get produced); in it, O'Donnell would play a magical nanny who grants children's wishes. Beyond her daily duty as TV's latest gab-master, O'Donnell will do a little telling of her own in a $3-million deal with Warner to publish her memoirs.











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