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This article is about the actress. For the television sitcom, see Roseanne (TV series).
Roseanne Cherrie Barr (born November 3 1952) is an Emmy Award-winning American actress, writer, talk-show host, and comedian. At times in her career she has also been known as "Roseanne Arnold" and "Roseanne Thomas". On the opening credits of one final-season episode of her TV show, she was credited as "Roseanne Barr Pentland Arnold Thomas". For several years in the late 1990s and early 2000s, she was known simply as Roseanne, but by 2005 had resumed referring to herself by her maiden name, Roseanne Barr.
BiographyEarly lifeShe was born in Salt Lake City to a working-class Jewish family, the oldest of four children. In her 1989 biography, she described her family's partial involvement in Mormonism, saying that on "Friday, Saturday, and Sunday morning I was a Jew; Sunday afternoon, Tuesday afternoon, and Wednesday afternoon we were Mormons".[1] She says this with her usual tongue-in-cheek humor, however; in actuality, she was raised fully Jewish.
While taping her show she separated from Pentland and later fell in love with fellow comedian Tom Arnold. In January 1990 she divorced Pentland and married Arnold. Four years later she and Arnold divorced. She later married her security guard, Ben Thomas, on Valentine's Day in 1995. They had one son, Buck Thomas. She and Thomas divorced in 2002. In a 1991 interview with People, Roseanne revealed herself to be an incest survivor, accusing both of her parents of physical and sexual abuse, charges which they and her sister Geraldine publicly denied. Geraldine later sold stories to the tabloids calling Roseanne a liar and accusing her of making up the story to boost her show's ratings. Geraldine also accused Roseanne of "unfairly" firing her from the cast of the show and claiming that Roseanne "owed" her half of the show's profits. It was during this period that the bonds Roseanne had with Laurie Metcalf, John Goodman, and the rest of her show's cast solidified. She also grew closer to her own real-life children and played a vital role in her oldest daughter overcoming alcoholism. To this day, Roseanne and most of the cast of Roseanne remain friends, despite the show's run being long over and everyone pursuing different paths in their lives. Career
In 1997, after the end of her sitcom's run, she portrayed the Wicked Witch of the West in a production of The Wizard Of Oz at Madison Square Garden. She went on to host her own talk show, The Roseanne Show which ran for two years before it was canceled in 2000. In the summer of 2003, she took on the dual role of hosting a cooking show (called Domestic Goddess) and starring in a reality show (called The Real Roseanne Show) about hosting a cooking show, although food poisoning and an emergency appendectomy brought a premature end to both projects. In 2005, she returned to stand-up comedy, touring the world. In February 2006, Roseanne performed her first-ever live dates in Europe as part of the Leicester Comedy Festival in Leicester, England. The shows took place at De Montfort Hall. She also released her first kids' DVD, Rockin' with Roseanne: Calling All Kids, that same month. Roseanne's return to the stage culminated in an HBO Comedy Special Roseanne Barr: Blonde N Bitchin', which aired November 4, 2006, on HBO. Two nights earlier, Roseanne returned to prime-time network TV with a guest spot on NBC's My Name Is Earl, playing a wacky nun. Roseanne has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6767 Hollywood Blvd. On January 11, 2007, TV Land announced that Roseanne will be the host of season three of The Search for the Funniest Mom in America on Nick @ Nite.[2] The show will air in spring 2007. She has also signed on to host a daily radio talk show on KCAA in the Los Angeles area. It has been rumored that Roseanne will return to television and ABC with a recurring role on season 4 of Desperate Housewives. Roseanne will play a new resident of Wisteria Lane and will be brought under the tagline "America's Original Housewife". Star Spangled Banner controversyOn July 25, 1990 Barr performed a controversial rendition of the Star Spangled Banner before a Cincinnati Reds-San Diego Padres baseball game in San Diego, California. As she later reported[citation needed], she was initially having trouble hearing herself over the public-address system, so she was singing as loudly as possible, and her rendition of the song sounded "screechy". Following her rendition, she mimicked the often-seen actions of players, by spitting, and grabbing her crotch as if adjusting a protective cup. Barr claimed she had been encouraged by baseball officials to "bring humor to the song,". The song and the closing routine offended many in the audience[citation needed], and it was replayed frequently on television, drawing further attention to it. Immediately following this incident, many tabloid media outlets published stories characterizing Barr, among other things, as America's "most hated woman"[citation needed] and made predictions that her career and television series would be severely damaged by the incident.[citation needed] These dire predictions proved to be incorrect; her show remained as popular as ever and she herself retained her large fan following. She referenced the incident on the Roseanne episode The Test (originally aired September 18, 1990) when she comments on what a nice Saturday morning it is and how it makes her feel like she could sing (she then pauses until the studio audience laughs, cheers, and applauds). She also joked about the incident later in season 3 in the episode Home Ec in the Buy N Bag scene. She also humorously referred to the incident a year later in her television movie, Backfield in Motion, in which her character, Nancy Seavers, is asked to sing the anthem. She responds incredulously, Me? Sing the national anthem? The line is followed by a long, dramatic pause, with the camera zooming in on her face. She then grins and says, I don't think so. On February 16, 1991, she joked about the incident further on Saturday Night Live in a skit called Comedy Killers, a mock game show about gags that aren't funny. A brief parody of the incident was included in the 1992 made-for-TV movie Tiny Toon Adventures: How I Spent My Vacation. As a result of her poor performance of the song, some ball clubs have a policy of pre-recording the song and having the guest singer merely lip-synch it. The Boston Red Sox, specifically, do this "In order to avoid a Roseanne incident" (as noted in the SABR publication, The Fenway Project). Self-rediscoveryBarr told James Rampton of The Independent that fame went to her head. Barr, who had worked as a window dresser and waitress in Denver, said she had become famous quickly and lost touch with reality. "I was in a sound studio for almost a decade. At the end of it, like Rip van Winkle, I came back and found that everything had changed. Suddenly there were computers and e-mails, and it took me another 10 years to catch up with regular people. But the TV show is over. What am I going to do? I can't boss people around anymore - sad but true." Barr went back to stand-up comedy but with a notably different appearance: she has lost some weight, dyed her hair blond, and had plastic surgery, which she does not recommend. "Now I realize that everyone has to get old and die, but it was still a very bad experience....No one looks better after plastic surgery. Just pink and shiny. At the end of it, you look like an idiot." Much of her surgery was for health reasons; she had a rhinoplasty to correct sleep apnea; while her breast reduction surgery was for health reasons. Television Work
Filmography
References
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