Roseanne Barr

Roseanne Barr (born November 3, 1952, Salt Lake City, Utah, U.S.) is an American comedian and actress who achieved stardom with the popular and innovative television situation comedy Roseanne (1988–97; 2018).

After dropping out of high school in her native Salt Lake City, Utah, Barr lived for a time in an artists’ colony in Colorado before marrying and raising a family in Denver. Encouraged by friends, she began doing stand-up comedy, developing her salty comic persona, initially self-labeled the “Domestic Goddess.” A particularly winning appearance on The Tonight Show in 1985 set the stage for major stardom and for her lead role as the wisecracking mother of the working-class Conner family in the successful ABC series Roseanne, for which she won an Emmy Award (1993). Barr made further forays into television with The Roseanne Show (1998–2000), a syndicated talk show, and Roseanne’s Nuts (2011), a reality series about her life as a macadamia nut farmer in Hawaii. Additionally, Barr acted in a number of films, including She Devil (1989), Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1993), and Blue in the Face (1995). In 2018 she reprised the role that made her famous in the nine-episode reboot of Roseanne, which visited the Conner family 20 years after the series ended. A ratings success, the show was renewed for another season. However, in May 2018 Barr, who was noted for her controversial comments on Twitter, wrote a racist tweet about Valerie Jarrett, a former adviser to U.S. Pres. Barack Obama. Barr subsequently apologized, but ABC canceled the series. The network retooled the show later that year without Barr, changing the title to The Conners.

Throughout her career, a significant element of Barr’s public persona was her bluntly voiced advocacy for women and the working class. While her political outspokenness contributed to her appeal, it also made her something of a controversial figure, and, at the height of her popularity, her personal life—she was married and divorced several times, most notably to actor Tom Arnold—was the subject of much tabloid journalism. In 2012 Barr, after failing to win the Green Party’s nomination for president of the United States, ran as the candidate of the Peace and Freedom Party. On the ballot in three states, she received a total of about 50,000 votes.

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Among the books Barr wrote were Roseanne: My Life as a Woman (1989), My Lives (1994), and Roseannearchy: Dispatches from the Nut Farm (2011).