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Early Life With Whoopi Goldberg
Alex Martin Dean was born on May 9, 1973, to the actress and her first husband, Alvin Martin. The Comic Relief star was only 18 years old at the time, and her ex-husband had been her drug counselor.
Their relationship started because the View co-host had been trying to beat a heroin addiction, and she reached out for help to the man who would later become her future husband. The two split in 1979 when Alex was 6 years old.
When Alex was born, the future superstar had already dropped out of high school. The mother-daughter duo ended up moving to California so Whoopi could chase her dreams of becoming both an actress and stand-up comedian. But it wasn’t easy.
In an interview with theGrio in 2015, Alex opened up about her family’s financial struggles early in life. "I know what it’s like with the food stamps, because my mom has her [Welfare] cards framed," Alex explained. "Seriously… I remember that… We didn’t have the money to go to movies. I found friends, I walked down the street, I climbed trees, I did camping."
Alex recalled sleeping in the same bed as her mother in their one-bedroom apartment and driving across the country in a broken down Volkswagen Bug. The prolific movie star did the best she could to make ends meet.
It wasn’t until Whoopi starred in a one-woman Broadway show when they found financial relief. The show caught the eye of the one and only Steven Spielberg. The iconic director would go on to cast her in The Color Purple in 1985, Whoopi’s first major film debut.
Whoopi married again when Alex was 13, to David Claessen, a Dutch cinematographer she met on the set of Who Are They? But it wasn’t meant to be. The couple split up two years later in 1988.
The Made in America actress would go on to marry one more time. She tied the knot with Lyle Trachtenberg in 1994, and the union dissolved in 1995.
