Hello, I'm Kirstie Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive for rights reasons

We've had to shorten the music. The program was originally broadcast in 2009

My cast away this week is Wuppie Goldberg, a successful actor, comic and producer. She made her name in the color purple and won her Oscar for Ghost. It was bound to happen. Even as a child, she used to practice making acceptance

speeches, and today she's one of only a handful of people to have won an Oscar, a Grammy, a Tony and Emmy awards. Yet despite her success, she is perhaps an uncomfortable role model. The only person she wants to please, she says, is herself.

An observant and quick child, she was also headstrong, she married young, had a child early, then she wrote her own sketch show. It found its way on to Broadway and her career was launched.

I was in the right place at the right time, seen by the right person, she says, and spectacular things happened. Well, they surely did with the Goldberg. You were seen by the right person back in, what was it? The 1980s, and that right person was Stephen Spielberg.

Did you do a sort of private performance for him or yes? What was that? Tell me about that. I'm intrigued.

I asked if I would mind bringing the Broadway show to him, and since it was just me, it felt like it would be all right. So I went and, before I went in, they said to me, now we want you to do whatever you want to do, whatever piece you want to do, but we also know you do a piece called Bleety, which was about the black ET.

And they said, we don't think that would be a good idea. And I said, okay, whatever, you know, that's fine with me. There's nothing in it that's bad.

So I do the show, I walk out, and I come out onto what I think is just a private stage, and everyone that, for me at the time, like Ashford and Simpson and Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones, those are the people who are sitting in the audience.

And so I do my show, and they're very happy, but they say more, more, more. And I said, well, I have more, but I've been asked not to do this piece.

And Stephen said, well, why? I said, they said you would be annoyed because it's really, it's about ET, the black ET, what would happen if he landed instead of in a very nice neighborhood, if he landed, say like an Oakland.

He said, oh, I want to see it. I said, you absolutely sure, because I don't want to upset you. He said, no, so I did it. And he laughed and laughed and laughed. And I thought, oh, first lesson of the world, ask the person directly.

Don't let someone else tell you that it's not going to work for somebody else. You should ask them.

Were you in any way aware that this was some sort of audition? No, no. And was it? Yeah. Right.

It seemed striking to me when I saw the color purple, that the role, the list of names went up of the cast at the beginning. And of course, one has the impression that this is an epic movie.

You're about to see something epic. Key, though, to the titles coming up, it said, and introducing Wuppie Goldberg.

This was your first ever movie role. That was for the times in Acronistic. I mean, that was something that people might have done in the movies in the 40s and 50s.

Really, you're saying to the audience, here is a fully formed star. You are going to love her. That's quite a pressure for a performer.

Well, fortunately, I didn't see it till much later. But the great thing about that is that you can only have that once in your life.

Because it does mean something. It really does mean something. So finally, when I saw the film and saw it come up, I just started quietly just kind of laughing under my breath going, wow.

Alice Walker, root the book. Is it true that you root Alice Walker when you read the book? Yes. What did you say in your letter?

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