Whoopi Goldberg is happy she lost her first Oscar nomination to Geraldine Page: 'I was applauding like crazy'

Whoopi Goldberg has no regrets about losing an Oscar to Geraldine Page.

Even without the knowledge that she would one day become an EGOT holder, Goldberg wasn’t disappointed when presenter F. Murray Abraham didn’t call her name at the 58th Academy Awards. Reflecting on that night in her new biography, Bits and Pieces: My Mother, My Brother, and Me, the actress says she was thrilled just to be recognized.

"When I got my first Oscar nomination for The Color Purple, I didn’t know how I felt about it," Goldberg writes in her book. "I knew I was good in the movie and that it was worthy of a nomination, but I didn’t expect one."

Ahead of the ceremony, Goldberg received dozens of calls from people assuring her that she would win: “I said to my mother, ‘This is all just very odd. I don’t know how to feel about any of this.’ And she said, ‘Well, the first thing you should remind yourself of is that you may not win. I know people are already saying to you that you’re gonna get it. That may not happen. You may not. So you need to just be glad you got here, the first time out.’”

Goldberg was up against a star-studded lineup of past and future Oscar winners: Anne Bancroft, Jessica Lange, Meryl Streep, and eventual winner, Geraldine Page. At the time, Goldberg felt especially connected to Page, who she once shared a neighborhood with in New York City and knew for her Broadway acclaim.

"I never had the money to see her when I was a kid, but I’d read about her shows in the newspaper,” she recalls. "I also knew she had been nominated for an Oscar many times and had never won one. To me, she is one of those be-all and end-all actors.”

When the moment finally came, Goldberg knew she had lost before the name was even read. The category’s presenter, Abraham, said he had "revered the winner for decades,” which tipped her off.

"I knew it was Geraldine Page for her performance in A Trip to Bountiful. And I was thinking, 'You’re not the only one who feels that way about her,’” Goldberg writes. “He announced Geraldine’s name. I was applauding like crazy. As she was walking to the stage, the actor sitting next to me said, ‘Why did you applaud so much when she beat you?’ I said, ‘What do you mean? That’s Geraldine Page. You know, she’s Geraldine Page.’”

Beyond being happy for the other actress, Goldberg felt she could share in Page's success: "This was her win, and in a way mine too because I was also a New York actor. I was thinking, 'She’s a New York actor. I’m a New York actor. And that was good enough for me.’"

Just a little more than a year later, Page died of a heart attack, yet another reason that Goldberg was "happy" that the Oscar win happened when it did. Goldberg won her own Academy Award just five years later, for her supporting role in Ghost. But even without a gilded trophy to take home, The View cohost says she gained a lot from the first nomination.

"Between doing the Broadway show with Mike Nichols and The Color Purple with Steven Spielberg, I knew I had something,” she says in her book. “I thought I was talented.”

It was also part of the reason that she didn’t take the backlash to heart, when she snide remarks about earning a nomination for her first movie role. When people “made little digs aimed at me,” she powered through.

"I began thinking, ‘F— you,’” she writes. “I was nominated because they thought I was good enough. And I don’t care what any of you boneheads say.”

Goldberg's Bits and Pieces: My Mother, My Brother, and Me is out now.

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