Roseanne Barr may have come from humble beginnings, but her over 30-year career in entertainment has turned her into one of the richest actresses in Hollywood. According to CelebrityNetWorth.com, Barr’s net worth in 2018 is approximately $80 million. But now that the rebooted Roseanne has been canceled after her racist tweet about former White House adviser Valerie Jarrett, she could stand to miss out on millions.
So how exactly did the stand-up comic and TV star make all her money? Here, we break down how she became one of the top-earning entertainers in the business.
Variety reported in 1993 that Roseanne reigned that year as the No.1 show in new syndication with $1 million per syndicated episode. Throughout the show’s nine seasons, a total of 222 episodes aired from 1988 to 1997, which meant that the cast continued to rake in royalties for years to come.
Acting, writing, and producing
Syndication is not the only way that Barr earned money from the show. She, of course, also was paid to star in it, and had executive producer and writing credits.
Barr earned $21 million during the last season of the show, Slate reported in 1997. But the article stated that her total net worth at the time was actually $40 million, due to how much Barr had earned from syndication rights and the launch of her own talk show, The Roseanne Show, which aired from 1998 to 2000. She was the second-highest paid woman in show business at the time, after Oprah Winfrey.
Outside of television, Barr also appeared in several films including She-Devil, Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Blue in the Face, Meet Wally Sparks, Cecil B. Demented, and more. She also did voice work for movies like Look Who’s Talking Too and the animated film Home on the Range.
Other projects
From 1989 to 1995, during the peak of her sitcom career, Barr released several books titled Stand Up!, Roseanne, My Life as a Woman, My Lives, and Roseanne: My Life and Loves. She also authored a fifth book titled Roseannearchy: Dispatches from the Nut Farm in 2011.
In November 2011, her ex-husband, Ben Thomas, filed legal documents amid the former couple’s custody battle for their teenage son, Buck. Court documents revealed that Thomas claimed Barr’s net worth at the time was $42 million, TMZ reported.
In the years that followed, Barr continued to appear on television shows, including reality television. She served as a judge on Last Comic Standing from 2014 to 2015, which likely helped add to her total net worth.
Barr’s big return to network television was in 2018 with the Roseanne reboot. Variety reports that she and her co-star John Goodman were each paid $250,000 per episode, and Season 1 consisted of nine episodes for a total of $2.25 million. And because actors usually negotiate a higher rate from season to season, that number was likely going to be higher for Season 2.
By comparison, the main cast of The Big Bang Theory make a whopping $900,000 per episode, and the main cast of Modern Family rake in $500,000 each episode.
