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O’Donnell and Madonna co-starred in 1992’s ‘A League of Their Own’
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Rosie O’Donnell recalls how she and Madonna, two “motherless daughters,” bonded immediately after meeting on A League of Their Own
These days when they get together, they mostly “talk about the kids”
In O’Donnell’s new one-woman show, Common Knowledge, she explores the loss of her mother, when Rosie was 10 years old, three days before her 11th birthday
Rosie O’Donnell still remembers what she first said to Madonna back when they began filming A League of Their Own in the early nineties.
“I had just seen Truth or Dare, and I had never met another woman whose mother died and they‘re named after their mother and then when you go to the gravesite, you see your name on the tombstone,” recalls O’Donnell in this week’s PEOPLE. “The first thing I said was, ‘My mom died when I was young and I was named after her too,’ and it was like we became sisters at that moment.”
O’Donnell explores the story of her mom, Roseann O’Donnell, who died when Rosie was ten years old, as well as raising her own family of five kids, in her intimate new one-woman show, Common Knowledge, opening July 22 at the Daryl Roth Theater in New York City.
These days when she and Madonna get together, she says, “We talk about the kids. We just hang out when she’s in New York.”
“I have to say Madonna has done one hell of a job raising those children,” she continues of her friend’s six kids. “She ran a very tight ship and I had a very not tight ship. Her kids, Lola and Rocco, would come over for a playdate when they were little and as soon as she left, I would give them an ice pop and turn on the cartoons. They didn’t get to watch TV. But she’s an amazing mother and those kids are concert pianists and artists and singers. She is pretty phenomenal. And a motherless daughter, even younger than I was when her mother died.” (Madonna was five when her mother, Madonna Ciccone, died from breast cancer.)
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Moving to Ireland in early 2025 would lead O’Donnell to reconnect to her mom for whom she’s named. “Everywhere I looked I saw people that looked like my family. 90-year-old women in the supermarket,” she says. ”Had my mom lived, that would have been her. When I started seeing those women, I started imagining what my life would have been like had she lived. I started writing about her, about being a mother while being motherless and being the older mother of a non-binary child (referring to her youngest, Clay, 13.) The show opens with the day she died and closes with the last time I saw her.”
“I tried to write it about 10 years ago and when I performed it, I would cry, and so I couldn’t really do it,” she says. “And when I first started doing this in Ireland, I did it in clubs in Dublin, and I would cry the first few times. I thought, well, if I could ever get past that -- and eventually I got to the point where I was able to.”
“It’s something I don’t think you ever get over,” she says of her mom’s death over 50 years ago. “I listen to Anderson Cooper’s show about death and grief. He lost his dad at ten. I’m always overwhelmed by the emotion. I wonder often if I could do it, if he asked me to--and not break down.”
Read the original article on People
