Rosie O’Donnell knew when her time was up as the host of “The Rosie O’Donnell Show.”
The comedian, 64, exclusively told Page Six that when she heard she had a cool $100 million in the bank, she promptly quit.
“When I heard that [number], I thought, ‘OK, now I’m done,” O’Donnell recalled. “And everyone was like, ‘Why are you leaving?’”
The Emmy winner said she realized she wanted to spend more time with her children once she knew she “had enough money to take care of everyone in my life, philanthropy and strangers.”
“I wanted to be at their softball games,” she added, “I wanted to be at school plays.”
“The View” alum‘s eponymous talk show ran from 1996 to 2002 and was enormously successful — so much so that Warner Brothers offered her $100 million for just two more years. She declined, shocking the studio bigwigs.
“They were like, ‘Why would you say no?’” she remembered, “and I was like, ‘Because I already have that money and if I think I need more, something’s wrong with me.’”
“I don’t get the billionaires,” the “A League of Their Own” star said. “I don’t get how people only measure their life in money, not what they can do for other people.”
O’Donnell, who moved to Ireland after President Trump won the 2024 election, is back stateside with her critically acclaimed one-woman show, “Common Knowledge,” for a limited run on Broadway.
The show delves into O’Donnell’s traumatic childhood — her mother died of breast cancer when she was 10 — as well as her life in Ireland and raising her fifth child, Clay, who has autism.
The “Harriet the Spy” star said the show’s theme at its core is about motherhood and how a “motherless daughter” learned “to be a mother to all these children.”
O’Donnell added that her experience of being a mom to Clay has “been very different.”
“It’s allowed me to see how I parented when I was younger in the midst of a high level of fame versus how I parent now with this one child who’s more vulnerable than any of my other children ever were,” she explained, “which creates an intimacy in some way.”
The post The staggering amount Rosie O’Donnell had in the bank when she quit her talk show appeared first on Page Six.
