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‘Molly, You in Danger Girl’ — A Look Back at Whoopi Goldberg’s Award Winning Performance in ‘Ghost’
While she was slowly turning heads in Hollywood before then, it was her performance in the 1990 classic film Ghost that really cemented Whoopi Goldberg‘s place in the industry and changed her career forever.
Five years after getting nominated for Best Actress at the Academy Awards for The Color Purple, Whoopi once again reached large heights for playing Oda Mae Brown, a charlatan pretending to talk to the dead in order to make a quick buck. The actress would star alongside Patrick Swayze in the film — in fact, her costar was so adamant about working with Whoopi that he threatened to bail on the movie if she wasn’t hired.
“(Patrick) got hired to do ‘Ghost’ and asked them, ‘Why hasn’t Whoopi Goldberg? Have you talked to her?’” the Hollywood star recalled on ITV’s Loose Women. “And they were like, ‘No, no. We didn’t go to her’. He said, ‘No, no I’m not committing to this until I talk to her to see if she wants to do this movie.'”
Eventually, the Dirty Dancing star got what he wanted. “So day comes and I go and (Patrick) says, ‘Why don’t you want to do this movie?’ And I said, ‘Wait, aren’t you Patrick Swayze?’ And he says, ‘Yes’, and I said, ‘What makes you think I don’t want to do the movie? I’d love to do the movie, they said they didn’t want me,” Whoopi continued.
Whoopi added, “So he said, ‘If you’re not going to hire her, I am not going to be in this film’. … And then I got the Oscar for it.”
“We had a a lot of fun,” the Sister Act star told Access Hollywood of being on set with Patrick.
Patrick wasn’t the only ’90s heavyweight that Whoopi starred alongside — Demi Moore also played a role, adding to her already successful film resume at the time. The movie not only would go on to become the highest-grossing film of 1990, it would leave plenty of iconic scenes and quotes in our minds for years — including Whoopi’s iconic, “Molly, you in danger girl.”
Whoopi even found herself recreating the classic scene during an appearance on Watch What Happens Live. She of course said her memorable line — a quote that has become a meme, even decades after Whoopi first uttered it. However, in 2018, when it was said to her during a press junket, the star didn’t exactly recall it.
“Oh, it was 35 years ago, I don’t watch my own movies,” Whoopi said according to Amber Riley. Well, we certainly remember it, and will never forget Whoopi’s most memorable performance!
