Rosie O’Donnell’s fallen for Australia. And now she’s got the tattoo to prove it

2 days ago 1

Opinion

October 17, 2025 — 7.30pm

American actor, comedian and talk show host Rosie O’Donnell has been touring Australia with her one-woman show, Common Knowledge. She performed at the Sydney Opera House last week, and takes the stage at Hamer Hall in Melbourne on Sunday afternoon.

Fitz: Welcome, Rosie! Now, when America’s Great White Fleet visited in Sydney in 1908, one of its sailors was so exhausted by the tumultuous reception that a few days later he was found asleep on a bench in Hyde Park, with a sign on his chest saying, “Yes, I’m delighted with the Australian people. Yes, I think your harbour is the finest in the world. But I’m very tired, and I’d like to go to sleep.” Is that how you feel after a week in Sydney Town?

“This is the best country in the world.”

RO’D: [Laughing merrily.] It has been amazing. I do love the people. I do love your harbour. And what an honour to have appeared at such an iconic venue as the Opera House. I so loved it that I got a tattoo of the Opera House sails put on my right thigh, near the hip, because I never want to forget the beauty. Listen, I’ve had a great time, and I have looked forward to doing this since I was a young girl. It even exceeded my wishes because I didn’t know how warm the people would be. This is the best country in the world.

Fitz: We are honoured. But that’s enough about how great we are. Let’s go to you. I did love your show on Tuesday evening, but confess surprise. I thought in a one-woman show looking back at your life and times you’d give in to the obvious, and it’d be filled with the Rosie O’Donnell Show, The View, the staggering highs you’ve known in your career, the titans of the entertainment and political world you’ve interviewed and befriended, and your famous fight with Donald Trump. But instead, you gave a compelling, moving and very funny account of raising your fifth child, Clay, who has autism?

RO’D: Well, the last 12 years, I’ve been immersed in autism because it’s a very interesting thing to have had four children and a couple of foster children, and then, in my 50th year, adopt a baby who, two years later, was diagnosed with autism. So for a decade, this is all I’ve been doing. And initially, when I did my show, some people, said, “Well, aren’t you going to talk about your career?” I’m like, “Not really, because this child takes precedence for me.” I left my very successful talk show to be a parent to all my children because my mother died at 39 and by the time I was 40, I had sort of retired, because I didn’t know when my own final day was going to arrive, and I didn’t want to miss my kids’ baseball games and their performances at school. I wanted to get to do all the things my mother had never done. So being a celebrity and having fame and all that is not the most interesting part of my life.

Rosie’s newly inked tattoo was created by artist Hailey at Little Frankie’s in Sydney.

Fitz: Well, there’ll be many parents who have children with autism starting out on this journey. What’s the singular piece of advice you can give to them?

RO’D: That when you’ve met one child with autism … you’ve met one child with autism. For me, rather than the gut punch it felt like when the doctor told me Clay had it – because you instantly think of Rain Man – it doesn’t have to be a life sentence of horrors. I have found it to be the most joyful and fulfilling parenting experience of my life because children with autism are so interesting, so curious and so different.

Fitz: Bravo. Even though you have resisted the obvious of talking about your career, I can’t. As we’ve been doing a little palling around over the last few days, I know some of the stunning yarns you’ve got. You were very unkind to yourself in the show, saying that growing up on Long Island, “I was the kid with the big pumpkin head”, but you still had the confidence early in your stand-up career, to decline to rush Bette Midler at a restaurant, as your friends did, on the grounds that “Someday soon, she and I are going to be friends, so I don’t want that to be awkward for us.”

RO’D: Yeah, it’s the truth. I was so certain that I would be friends with these women who I admired my whole life – Bette Midler, Barbra Streisand, Julie Andrews – I was like, “I can’t go and ‘bum-rush’ them at a restaurant.” That’s how certain I was. I mean, it was a little bit delusional, truthfully, but I was certain. I had a sense of knowing, since I was very young, that I would be famous. I don’t know how I knew that, but I did.

Rosie O’Donnell was introduced to the world of AFLW in Melbourne during Pride Round.

Fitz: And sure enough, just a few years later, there you are starring in A League of Their Own with Geena Davis, Tom Hanks – and the woman we call Madonna who you probably call “Maddie” – which led to things like Sleepless in Seattle, your own Rosie O’Donnell Show and The View. One report I saw said that, at your height, you were making $US50 million a year. America is awash with stand-up comics all wanting to make it big. Can you park your humility for a moment and answer: what quality, seriously, did you bring to the table that allowed you to break through at such a level?

RO’D: Tenacity. My dad used to say to me, “You have to have something to fall back on.” And I’d say, “No, Dad, I don’t plan on falling back.” Now, a lot of young comedians will come over to me and go, “I’m thinking of quitting because it’s just too hard, and do you have any advice?” I say, “Yes, if you’re thinking of quitting now, you should do so because it’s only through certainty of knowing that you are going to succeed that you’ll be able to actually live the dream.” And I think I also have a quality of authenticity that makes people warm to me. So if I’m sitting at a dinner with a who’s who of celebrities for someone’s birthday, I’m the one that other patrons will kneel next to, tap me on the shoulder and say, “Oh my God, you are sitting with Bruce Springsteen.” “Yes, I am, and you better get back to your table before security comes, but I’ll come over to your table shortly.”

Fitz: At the Opera House, you talked about how much your late mother loved Barbra Streisand records, only for the singer herself to appear on your show 30 years later – and you were so overwhelmed, you had to take a moment to compose yourself.

RO’D: Listening to Barbra was the way I stayed connected to my mother. So when Barbra walked through that curtain, it felt like it was my mother. And all my siblings were sitting in the front row. They’re all crying. I’m crying. It was a monumental moment. And even now, when I see the clip, I start to cry, because that’s the tip of the iceberg of how much I love and admire her. But I never pushed it. Like, I have her phone number, but I don’t use it because I don’t want to. I’m so grateful for the love that she showed me – for the compassion and understanding – that I never want to be in any way annoying. I send her a huge thing of flowers on April 24 every year, for her birthday, with a note, but I never try to push the boundaries. People say, “Are you friends with her?” I’m like, “Sure I’m ‘friends with her’ in the celebrity vernacular, but we don’t hang out.” You know, it’s not like, I call her and say, “Barbra, I think I have a lump on my breast” – she’s not a friend like that. But I’m sure if I did, she would be loving, nothing but loving.

“When Trump was elected the second time, I knew I needed to move to Ireland.”

Fitz: Without gushing in too unseemly a fashion myself, please tell me that Bruce Springsteen and Robert De Niro are as magnificent as I think they are from afar.

RO’D: They are exactly who you think they are from afar because they both are authentic people and their artistry comes from their truth, and that’s why both of them are speaking out against Trump. They’re both using their voice and their platform in defiance of whatever threats and worry and fear … they get to speak out for the country that gave them so much, which is exactly why I do it as well.

Fitz: Speaking of which, your own famous feud with Trump started in 2006 on The View when you held up a metaphorical middle finger and said, “Donald, sit and spin, my friend!”

RO’D: Yes, one of his Teen Miss America girls had been photographed kissing a girl in a bar, and he made her publicly apologise to the world at a press conference. Our show was on right after it, so I said all the truths about him, about how outrageous it was that he was presenting himself as the moral compass. “Sit and spin!” So that started a 20-year feud, and I’ve never had a conversation with the man ever in my life. A lot of people give up, but I don’t. When he takes a shot, I take a shot right back. In his first term, he was cultivating hatred, racism, bigotry. So when he was elected the second time, I knew I needed to move to Ireland. And I did.

Fitz: Trump has infamously threatened to revoke your citizenship. When you next turn up at JFK Airport going back to your own country, your own state, will you be nervous when you present your passport saying, “I am Rosie O’Donnell, American citizen who hasn’t even scored a parking fine in recent times, here, on a brief visit home?”

RO’D: Yes, because his followers are dangerous, violent people. The people at the insurrection on January 6 were not left-wing liberals. They were all Trump followers in MAGA hats, and they were encouraged to go and do that by Trump. So I will be nervous about getting in because he uses me, and he has for 22 years, to rile his base. He uses me as his arch-enemy and nemesis, like we’re in some kind of Batman movie. He uses me as this big, bad, scary thing that America should be afraid of – and a third of the country believes him, so that makes it an extremely dangerous place for me to be. But I won’t stop being myself. I won’t stop saying how democracy is in danger, and we’re on the precipice of fascism if we don’t act now.

Fitz: But beyond the danger of his supporters, is there any chance when you land that you’ll be in some kind of legal trouble for speaking out against Trump?

RO’D: Yes, there is. Look what he’s doing to James Comey, the former director of the FBI, and New York Attorney-General Letitia James. He’s getting the Department of Justice – his personal thug crew – to indict them. I think there is a definite chance he will try to say that I’m a domestic terrorist for speaking out against the idiocy and cruelty of his administration. And so I will have security – a hired group of people who give me advice – when I do arrive. They will be there at the airport to advise, record everything and to make sure that I’m not sent to some prison in El Salvador.

Fitz: OK. Whatever happens, and however much Ireland loves you, I reckon Australia loves you more, and we’ll leave a light on for you.

RO'D: Thank you so much!

Peter FitzSimons is a journalist and columnist. Connect via X.