A few minutes into the new movie adaptation of “The Color Purple,” young Celie (Phylicia Pearl Mpasi) is in the middle of giving birth in her bedroom. It’s a tough scene, given that she is only in her early teen years and the baby is a result of rape by the man she knows to be her father. And this second child, like her first, will be taken away from her immediately.
Still, there is a great sense of comfort, thanks to a familiar face.
“You’re doing just fine, Miss Celie,” says a midwife, played by none other than Whoopi Goldberg. “I just need you to push one more time.”
The surprise cameo was a way for the cast and creatives of the new Warner Bros. movie, now in theaters, to pay tribute to its on-screen predecessor. Goldberg’s first major movie role was starring in Steven Spielberg’s 1985 adaptation as Celie, a poor Black woman living in the rural South in the early 1900s. Goldberg had written to author Alice Walker after reading her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, begging to play any character in the film. Walker responded that Goldberg was already on her radar for the lead role.
“I liked her right away,” Walker wrote in her 1997 book “The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult” of watching Goldberg in her one-woman stage show before she was cast. “I like people who refuse to be victims and delight in showing everybody else how this is done. She was wonderful, dreadlocking, with an irrepressible, sly gleam in her eye.”