Genealogy show helps Rosie O’Donnell face mom’s early death

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Updated: August 4, 2011 4:20PM

Everything is coming up Rosie again.

“I’m thrilled to be back,” says Rosie O’Donnell, who is upfront when asked why she’s doing a talk show this fall for the Oprah Winfrey Network.

“Because Oprah asked me,” she says with a laugh during a phone interview.

“You know, Oprah is an epic talent, and for her to ask me was a huge honor. I can’t wait to start.”

On Friday, O’Donnell will be the subject of NBC’s celebrity genealogy show “Who Do You Think You Are?” What will viewers learn?

“Well, they’ll learn I need a haircut, because that’s the one thing I saw when I saw the rough cut. Boy, I could have used a trim,” she jokes. “Seriously, I didn’t really know very much about my family history at all. Lisa [Kudrow, the show’s producer] and I are friendly, and she asked me if I would do her show. I said, ‘As long as we do my mom’s side. I would really be curious because I knew nothing about her life.’ ”

The results were eye-opening. “From the start, I said, ‘I guess I don’t want to find out that my mom and her family lived an early life like Angela’s Ashes,” she says. “And I came to find something very similar, if not even harder than the life that author Frank McCourt lived. That was shocking for me.”

O’Donnell was only 10 when she lost her beloved mom to cancer.

“Nobody mentioned my mother after she died in 1973. It was like Lord Voldemort. You couldn’t say the name,” she says. “Nobody said ‘mom’ in that house or ‘mommy’ or ‘mother’ from 1973 on. I always wanted to know who she was and what she felt like, and to have her and see her through a woman’s eyes as opposed to a child looking up to their mom.”

O’Donnell says fans approach her all the time to talk about losing mothers to cancer.

“I think no matter what age, when you lose your mom it’s your mommy,” she says. “I remember my friend Jeannie lost a mom who was in her 70s and a grandmother in her 90s and when her grandmother died, she kept calling out, ‘Mommy, mommy.’

“The bottom line is that everybody has that kind of natural, base, primal wound connection, and if it’s severed it becomes a permanent wound,” she says. “My wound is the mother-child connection. But I did find out that when you do search for your lost parent’s past that it does help heal it a little bit.”

O’Donnell has other advice.

“I’ve found that the most helpful thing I could tell anyone to do who has lost their mother is to get the Hope Edelman book Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss,” she says. “When she wrote the book in ’95, she had written me and asked if I could do an interview. I remembered thinking it was going to be cue violin background music. You know, poor celebrities whose mothers have died when they were young. If I had known what that book was really going to be, I would have participated and I would have begun my healing so much earlier.”

The comedian says that as she ages, she also laments.

“It’s weird for me to be 49 years old, a decade more than she lived. I’m getting to things that she never did, like raising teenagers.

“In some ways, she’s lucky,” she jokes.

She sobers and adds, “I’m getting to experience it all, but I don’t have a mother to call and talk to about it.”

O’Donnell has found solace in her family and with her work, including the OWN talk show. It won’t be a retread of the old “Rosie O’Donnell Show.”

“It won’t be a bunch of guests coming in to promote a movie. It’s going to be a single topic, one hour, similar to Oprah’s, although nobody can come close to doing what she actually did,” she says.

As for other future projects, O’Donnell isn’t ruling out Broadway. “There’s talk of James Lapine directing ‘Annie’ on Broadway in 2012,” she says. “I have let it be known rather loudly that I would like to play Miss Hannigan.

“In the future, I’d love to be able to do stand-up again. I toured with Cyndi Lauper for a couple of summers, opening for her and playing the drums and doing stand-up. It was so thrilling and so much fun.

“I enjoy live performances probably the most,” she says.

On the home front, O’Don­nell laments that none of her kids has the acting bug. “I tried to be a stage mother and force them, but it didn’t work. None of them are into it.”

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