In The Color Purple, which actress received an Academy Award nomination for playing Celie?

In The Color Purple, Whoopi Goldberg received an Academy Award nomination for playing Celie.

Celie is the film’s central character, an African American woman in the early twentieth-century American South whose life changes through relationships with her sister Nettie, Sofia, and Shug Avery. Goldberg’s performance marked her film debut and earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress.

The 1985 film was directed by Steven Spielberg and adapted from Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1982 novel. Oprah Winfrey also received an Oscar nomination for her supporting performance as Sofia, which is why the two actresses are sometimes confused in questions about the film’s nominations.

Goldberg did not win the award that year; Geraldine Page won Best Actress for The Trip to Bountiful. Goldberg later became an Academy Award winner for Ghost in 1991.