Rosie O’Donnell moved to Dublin, but Broadway keeps calling her back

Rosie O'Donnell

Photo: Photographer not credited. / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 21, 1962 Commack, New York, United States
Occupation	Comedian, actress and television host
Known for	Tarzan, Pitch Perfect 2, A League of Their Own
Awards	2 Emmy · Tony Award

At Studio 54, in a theater built for excess, Rosie O’Donnell has taken over from Rachel Dratch as the Narrator of The Rocky Horror Show, the dry, bookish figure who stops the action to explain to the audience what it is watching. It is a two-week job, and she flew in from Dublin to do it. It is also her first Broadway role since she played Golde in Fiddler on the Roof. For a performer the country first knew as the Queen of Nice, and later as one of its most stubborn public combatants, the part fits better than it looks: the narrator is the one person on stage who never pretends the show is anything other than what it is.

That instinct goes back to Commack, on Long Island, where Roseann O’Donnell grew up in an Irish Catholic family. Her mother, also named Roseann, died of breast cancer on St Patrick’s Day, when her daughter was ten. Half a century later, O’Donnell would open a solo show with that date and follow it with a burst from a confetti gun, which says most of what needs saying about how she handles grief in public.

She was born on 21 March 1962, lost her mother in 1973, and was doing stand-up by her late teens, long before anyone had a use for her on screen. She tried Dickinson College and then Boston University and left both. Comedy clubs were the actual school. In 1984 she won five straight weeks on Star Search, the television talent contest, and the clubs started to fill.

Hollywood found a use for her in the early 1990s, and it was nearly always the same one. Penny Marshall cast her as Doris Murphy, the loud third baseman of the Rockford Peaches, in A League of Their Own, next to Geena Davis, Madonna and Tom Hanks. Nora Ephron made her Meg Ryan’s wisecracking colleague in Sleepless in Seattle. She was Betty Rubble in The Flintstones, Ole Golly, the nanny who leaves the girl she helped raise, in Harriet the Spy, and the voice of Terk, the gorilla with the jokes, in Disney‘s Tarzan. The funny friend, never the lead.

Television gave her the lead. The Rosie O’Donnell Show ran in daytime syndication from 1996 to 2002 and turned her into the most generous host on the dial: Broadway casts sang in the studio, guests were handled with fan-girl delight, and the press settled on calling her the Queen of Nice. The show won Daytime Emmys for itself and for her, year after year. Then she began dismantling the brand piece by piece. In 2002 she walked away from Rosie, the magazine that carried her name, in a dispute over editorial control, and that same year, as the talk show was ending, she came out as a lesbian on stage at a comedy club benefit.

The stage had been there all along. She played Rizzo in Grease on Broadway in 1994, took over as the Cat in the Hat in Seussical in 2001, put her own money into producing Taboo, which closed in 2004 after roughly a hundred performances, and played Golde in Fiddler on the Roof into 2005. She hosted the Tony Awards more than once and won an Emmy for one of those broadcasts. In 2003 she founded what is now Rosie’s Theater Kids, which trains New York public school students in dance, music and drama for free; in 2014 the Tonys gave her the Isabelle Stevenson Award for it.

The harder chapter is the one most people remember. As moderator of The View from 2006, she mocked Donald Trump on air over the Miss USA pageant, and he answered with insults that never really stopped, including from a presidential debate stage nine years later. She left the show in 2007, returned in 2014 and left again within months; her own talk show on OWN lasted less than six months. Her critics’ case is that the fight became the act and crowded out the comedy. There is something to it. The Queen of Nice was always a partial portrait, and the combative O’Donnell was not a late invention but the same performer with the volume up. Even her new show has drawn that complaint from the other direction: reviewing it for Slate, Scaachi Koul found it a little clunky, a little unclear, and noted that leaving the country is an exit most of her audience does not have.

Between the fights, the acting work kept quietly improving. She played Tutu, the heroine’s chaotic mother, in Showtime’s SMILF, a social worker in the HBO miniseries I Know This Much Is True, and Vi, the owner of a hidden gay bar, in Prime Video‘s 2022 series version of A League of Their Own, three decades after the film. In 2025 Cynthia Nixon suggested her for And Just Like That…, where she played Mary, a nun who loses her virginity to Miranda. She survived a heart attack in 2012 and has five children, the youngest of whom, Clay, is autistic.

Clay is the reason the current chapter exists. In January 2025 O’Donnell moved with him to Dublin and applied for Irish citizenship through her grandparents. The solo show Common Knowledge, built around life with Clay, opened at the 3Olympia in Dublin that summer, sold out a ten-night run at the Edinburgh Fringe, played the Sydney Opera House and arrived at New York’s Daryl Roth Theatre in July 2026 under the direction of Gabriel Barre. In August she spent a week guest-hosting Jimmy Kimmel Live! and closed it singing a rewritten Danny Boy at the president.

The Rocky Horror run ends on 18 October, and Dratch returns two days later. After that, O’Donnell goes home to Dublin, where she told The Late Late Show in September that the citizenship papers were, in her words, any day now. The narrator steps off, and the next part she plays will be written in Ireland.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Tom Hanks, A League of Their Own, Rosie O'Donnell, The Rocky Horror Show

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