DUBLIN — “Welcome to Ireland, Rosie,” said the woman walking toward her as she headed back from the store on Halloween night with candy. The passerby — a total stranger to Rosie O’Donnell — added blithely: “We hate him, too.”
Everyone here seems to recognize the American entertainer and know why she left the United States to move here in January.
“I felt on the verge of crying when I was there, when he got elected,” O’Donnell told an Irish television audience during a talk show appearance in March.
She’s a sensitive soul, a giant exposed nerve who has posed, successfully, for most of her life and career as a brassy Long Island toughie. Donald Trump’s first administration took an emotional toll on the die-hard liberal, even as she tweeted and marched and spit invective against the president every chance she got.
She didn’t think she could endure a second term. The stakes felt higher, too. A lesbian who has married and divorced two wives and adopted several children, O’Donnell, 63, worried about life under an administration that has been hostile to gay rights and gender-nonconforming people in general; her youngest, 12-year-old Clay, is nonbinary. O’Donnell fretted about what the dismantling of the Education Department would mean for special-ed services for Clay, who has been diagnosed with autism.
This time, she had a plan, which she worked out with her therapist. O’Donnell’s paternal grandparents were from Ireland, easing her path to citizenship, and she knew the country from her trip here as a girl, soon after her mother had died of breast cancer.
“People said: ‘Why didn’t you go to Italy or France?’” she said on her television appearance in March. “Because I’m Irish. So I went to Ireland.”
The truth is, O’Donnell had no idea what it would be like to live on the Emerald Isle, an exile from the land of her birth, the locus of her fame.
A lot of celebrities talked about leaving the country if Trump retook the White House, but most stayed, other than O’Donnell and Ellen DeGeneres, who decamped from Montecito, California, for rural England with her spouse, Portia de Rossi.
Of course, there are a lot of good reasons for a fabulously wealthy person to live in Europe, and for some of them, self-imposed exile is an affordable luxury in service to their genuine political views and concerns. Most, in other words, don’t have O’Donnell’s uniquely personal history with the president or the sense of urgency it spurred for her.
In the 1990s, Trump and O’Donnell shared space on the same tier of fame (solidly B-list) and even similar public personae: vivid triborough loudmouths who could be counted on for 15 minutes of entertaining late-show bluster.
He was the Manhattan real estate mogul trying to go global, perpetually hinting at greater ambitions. She was the stand-up comic making Hollywood inroads as a movie sidekick — sturdy, bat-flipping third basewoman Doris Murphy in “A League of Their Own,” Meg Ryan’s wisecracking best friend in “Sleepless in Seattle.”
Then one career took off. Hers.
O’Donnell’s hard-to-slot talents found their medium in daytime talk shows — first with her syndicated “Rosie O’Donnell Show,” where she specialized in Broadway belters, cute kids, charity fundraising, former teen idols and a generalized niceness. Her more caustic side reemerged in 2006 during the first of two stints of juicing ratings on ABC’s “The View,” where she took on the George W. Bush administration, the firearm industry, the Catholic Church, her conservative co-hosts — and Trump, who by then had bought in to the beauty pageant business.
In December 2006, O’Donnell spent several minutes of a roundtable segment on “The View” blasting the showy way Trump dragged out his deliberations over whether to fire Miss USA Tara Conner after a drug and alcohol scandal. She also mocked his hair, called him bankrupt and compared him to “snake oil salesmen.”
“Left the first wife, had an affair; left the second wife, had an affair. Had kids both times, but he’s the moral compass for 20-year-olds in America,” she said, drawing hearty laughter from the studio audience. “Donald, sit and spin, my friend.”
In a separate TV appearance that same day, Trump threatened to sue. “Rosie O’Donnell is disgusting, I mean both inside and out,” he said. “Take a look at her, she’s a slob. She talks like a truck driver.”
Two decades later, he’s in the White House and she’s on the far side of an ocean. Yet he still can’t get her name out of his mouth.
Their relationship cuts to the heart of the Trump M.O. Even now, no slight is too old to remember, no target too distant to attack. So as their public profiles shot in opposite directions — he, from reality star to two-term president; she, from talk show icon to occasional cable show actress — he could not resist reigniting their feud.
In August 2015 during a presidential debate with Hillary Clinton:
“You’ve called the women you don’t like fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals,” said moderator Megyn Kelly, then a Fox News host, as she teed up a question.
“Only Rosie O’Donnell,” Trump cut in, eliciting laughter from his supporters.
Even this year: When Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin visited the White House in March, Trump — cued by a question from a reporter from the right-wing channel Real America’s Voice — told him he was “better off not knowing” O’Donnell.
The exchange was so surreal, O’Donnell said later, that she wrote a note to Martin explaining her history with Trump and apologizing that he had been put in that position.
Suddenly, what had once seemed like a classic showbiz rivalry — a Joan Crawford-Bette Davis slap fight rebooted for the reality TV era — was beginning to feel more ominous than absurd.
In July, Trump posted a distortedly large photo of O’Donnell’s face on social media and called for her citizenship to be taken away because she is “incapable … of being a great American.”
Was he kidding? Experts agreed that presidents have no such power. Still, in coming months, other Trump critics called out in the president’s posts would feel the heat, direct or indirect, of his administration’s investigatory and regulatory powers: Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, James B. Comey, Letitia James, Adam Schiff.
Unbowed, O’Donnell responded by posting a photo of Trump smiling, his arm around the late disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
“You are everything that is wrong with America,” she wrote, “and I’m everything you hate about what’s still right with it.”
She signed off with a reference to the sadistic boy tyrant of “Game of Thrones”: “You want to revoke my citizenship? Go ahead and try, King Joffrey with a tangerine spray tan.”
Those who know “Ro,” as her friends call her, understand why she left. It’s that exposed nerve. Others can click the remote. She finds herself drawn in, consumed, overwhelmed.
The root of her focus is no mystery. Her mother’s death, just before her 11th birthday, created a pervasive sadness at home that she has spent a lifetime trying to offset. That’s why she became so committed to mothering, whether through the five children she adopted or the nonprofit adoption agency she funded. She knows she is too indulgent of her kids, because, as she’ll admit, all that matters to her is that they’re happy. She also has a soft spot for strangers in peril.
When she was 12, O’Donnell turned on the TV and watched the evacuation of Saigon, as people were scrambling to get onto airplanes. She began to cry after she saw an older lady get pushed off the stairway and out of the frame. What would become of her? How could they do that? Her father’s response: Stop watching the news.
In 1999, O’Donnell was in the midst of her first Emmy-winning talk show run when a pair of teenagers opened fire at Colorado’s Columbine High School and killed 13 of their classmates. O’Donnell cried every day, haunted by the idea that there were children killing each other in schools. That led to an unexpected on-air showdown with Tom Selleck, who chose that unfortunate moment to appear on her show to promote the forgettable romantic comedy “The Love Letter.” O’Donnell blistered him with questions about gun control and his advocacy for the National Rifle Association.
“I didn’t come on your show to have a debate,” the exasperated actor replied. “I came on your show to plug a movie.”
Friends have watched helplessly as O’Donnell gets drawn into various other exotic dramas. There was a mother who called the adoption agency seeking help with her teenage daughter, Stacie, who had been raped by a youth minister and was pregnant. O’Donnell tracked down Stacie, conferred with her daily and eventually offered to fly her to stay with her brother Eddie and his family as she carried the pregnancy to term.
The plan fell apart when Stacie turned out not to be pregnant or even “Stacie.” She was a woman named Michelle, said to have multiple personalities. After documenting the peculiar relationship in her 2002 memoir, “Find Me,” O’Donnell ended up giving Michelle half of the book’s proceeds — $1.5 million. And they still talk.
O’Donnell also developed friendships with Lyle Menendez, who had been convicted, along with his brother, Erik, of murdering his parents in 1989; and with Lynndie England, the former Army reservist convicted of abusing prisoners in Iraq. O’Donnell is compelled to help them because she believes, after hearing their stories, that they have been unfairly judged.
Then there are the random acts of kindness. O’Donnell rescued boaters on her Jet Ski when they got stranded off Miami. She lifted an obese woman who had fallen while getting out of her car, the strain of which contributed to the star’s near-fatal heart attack in 2012. Even in Ireland, she’s already had an incident. O’Donnell was dining out when she saw an elderly woman choking on her steak. She scrambled over and gave her the Heimlich, catching the chewed chunk of meat in a napkin.
“And while I was panicking,” O’Donnell says, “she sat down and ate the remaining steak.”
This impulse to help — anyone, anywhere, at whatever cost — is a constant source of frustration for her friends.
“I love her, I worry about her, and I fear for her,” says Sheila Nevins, the trailblazing documentary producer who worked with O’Donnell on several projects.
She was able to get O’Donnell to do her last special, “A Heartfelt Standup,” by convincing her that talking about her heart attack would raise awareness among women.
“In rescuing others, she is always trying to rescue her hurt inner child,” says actress Fran Drescher, a close friend. “And you know, it’s not really the way to fix yourself.”
But Carolyn Strauss, a longtime friend and the former head of HBO’s original programming, says O’Donnell isn’t doing this by choice. She has to.
“Her membrane between her and the world is very porous,” Strauss says. “We all, in order to cope with life, have a bit of a protective layer. You can sort of intellectually go, ‘Oh, God, that’s terrible.’ But I think she has a particular gravitational pull toward the wounded among us, especially emotionally and psychologically wounded.”
That connection to strangers could be overwhelming when O’Donnell was at the height of her fame. But here, in Ireland, there is a different vibe. People approach constantly — in restaurants, at pubs, on the street — but with none of the pushiness that defines the American celebrity experience. They may offer her a business card if they’re involved in a cause they think she’ll appreciate, but they don’t make demands.
It’s a perfect climate for someone who always found her relationship with fame curious.
She calls herself the “celebrity noncelebrity.” She’s mingling with Madonna, texting Natasha Lyonne and getting adoption advice from Martin Short. Yet we in the public treat her as one of us, someone who happens to be a bridge to that other world — the “E-ZPass” of celebrities, she jokes.
“People would come up to me, tap me on my shoulder and go, ‘Is that Bruce Springsteen next to you?’” O’Donnell says. “I’d say, ‘Yeah, can you believe it?’”
Jeanne Kopetic, a friend since seventh grade in Commack, New York, recently visited O’Donnell in Dublin. Everything felt different. They could go shopping or to the local market or just walk down the street with ease.
“She used to go from the car to the house quickly,” Kopetic says. “She was barricaded by security gates here in the States. Now she kind of comfortably just settles herself among the people.”
At O’Reilly’s, the local pub, O’Donnell walks in and asks the bartender, whom she now knows, for a Smithwick. He teases her for a second about the red ale that’s typically low in alcohol content: “You got your grandpa here with you?” On one visit, she says, she ended up talking all night to a young couple, even holding their baby. They were deep into the conversation before letting on that they knew who she was.
“You’re big fans, and you didn’t tell me for two hours?” she says with a laugh.
Then there’s Clay. O’Donnell went from worrying about school budget cuts to watching her youngest thrive, walking to school each morning, making new friends. Halloween was particularly exciting, with Clay handing out candy to trick-or-treaters and special prizes for best costume.
Clay has gifts, O’Donnell says. They spoke their first full sentence before they turned 1 — O’Donnell has the proof on video — and likes to pepper their mother with questions. (Exactly how deep is the Mariana Trench?) The Dublin school Clay attends offers support for autistic children. Clay is so happy that O’Donnell had to promise to remain in Dublin even after Trump leaves office.
Moving to Ireland has also reconnected her with her craft.
O’Donnell will play a mother in an Irish sitcom that starts filming this summer. And she’s been asked whether she’d be open to doing a weekly TV interview show. Her 23-year-old daughter, Viv, can sense a new mood when they talk on the phone.
“Before, I’d be like, ‘How are you?’ And she’d be like, ‘Yeah, I’m okay. Just another day,’ and then talk about the news a lot,” Viv says. “Now I’ll call her. She’ll talk about Clay. She’ll talk about how beautiful Ireland is. She’ll talk about work.”
Lately, O’Donnell has been pondering ways to examine a topic she has always struggled with: the loss of her mother. It has been 10 years since HBO’s “A Heartfelt Standup.” She had been working on a one-woman show about Clay’s autism. But in Ireland, O’Donnell instead began writing about her mother’s death, which happened on St. Patrick’s Day 1973.
The resulting show, “Common Knowledge” (Clay’s mocking expression for things O’Donnell is oblivious about), won praise when she performed it at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival; she’d love to turn it into a cable special. While in many ways a departure from her earlier stand-up work, it taps into her knack for turning real-life challenges and bleak experiences into comedy. Early in the show, she delivers a harrowing description of a 10-year-old confronted by her mother’s death. Then O’Donnell pauses for a breath.
“Now I know what some of you are thinking,” she reassures her stricken audience. “Did I buy the wrong f—ing ticket? I thought this was the Rosie O’Donnell comedy show, not g—-n ‘Angela’s Ashes,’ the musical. Well, fear not. There will be jokes. I promise. But I couldn’t tell you about my life without the tragic Irish beginning. So here we go.”
If only she could stop thinking about him. Every day, whether she’s been at the pub enjoying a pint or shopping with Clay for a thrift shop sweater, O’Donnell still finds herself going online. She will post upward of a dozen links about Trump, ranging from videos showing him nodding off in the Oval Office to articles critical of his actions. She can’t resist.
Granted, it was worse before. During his first term, when she wasn’t channeling her depression into drinking and overeating, O’Donnell doodled more than 200 portraits of Trump on her iPad. The images showed a fire-engine-red-faced president punctuated by phrases like “The Moron” and “Loser” and “Liar.”
That kind of obsessiveness is why she knew she had to leave. Her brother Eddie, who has been helping get her citizenship paperwork in order, says it’s “the best decision she’s made, I think, in her life, honestly.”
Still, when you have a phone and a fixation, it can be hard to totally disengage.
The Wednesday before Thanksgiving, O’Donnell promised her therapist that she would not post anything about Trump for two days. It lasted maybe a few hours.
“Roseann, you’ve got to detach,” an annoyed Kopetic told her during her visit. “You’ve got to disconnect.”
So she tried again. The first promise broken, she made another that Friday. This time, O’Donnell vowed not to post about Trump for three days. She told her 1.2 million Instagram followers that she was “gonna try again to not give him a minute of me.”
But her sign-off alluded to yet another recent Trump moment that had been eating at her — his ugly retort to a female journalist who had asked him a question about Epstein.
“Quiet, piggy,” O’Donnell wrote, echoing Trump’s own words to Bloomberg reporter Catherine Lucey on Nov. 20.
Somehow, even she knew she wouldn’t be able to keep this latest promise.
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