Rosie O'Donnell Recalls Son Parker Seeing Her Character in 'Tarzan': 'That Monkey Is My Mama!'

Mar. 15, 2025

Photo: Rosie O’Donnell Instagram

Rosie O’Donnellis looking back on what it was like the first time her kids could see her work.

Appearing onTheKelly ClarksonShow, theAmerican Gigoloactress recalled what it was like taking her two oldest kids — son Parker, 27, and daughter Chelsea, 25 — to seeTarzanas kids, the first time they experienced her work.

“I took them to seeTarzan. I was Turk, I was the monkey in that,” she shared.

“I was like ‘Yes! I didn’t know you would get that.'”

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O’Donnell, 60, went on to recall the first time her son Blake, 23, saw her inA League of Their Own, after a friend played it during a party. He told his mom that she was “like a teenager” in the film, “playing baseball and you sounded like Sylvester Stallone.”

She laughed and told her son, “Blakey, that’s my most famous movie. That’s how I became an entertainer, from that movie.”

He replied, “Yeah I never saw it, but it was weird to see you that young.”

In addition to Parker, Chelsea, and Blake, O’Donnell is also mom to daughters Vivienne, 19, and Dakota, 9.

Chloe Aftel

Clarkson asked O’Donnell how her parenting has changed over the years, to which the actress admitted that she was “much too much of a lenient mother” with her older children.

“I wanted to give them everything, my older ones, when I was a young mother in my early thirties. I come to find out now, as a 60-year-old mother of a 9-year-old, that making the world so smooth and without a bump for them doesn’t serve them in adulthood,” she explained.

“It really doesn’t, and I was much too much of a lenient mother with my older ones and much too much trying to repair my own childhood through mothering them,” she continued.

“Now I have a little daughter who has autism, she’s 9 years old. Her autism is magical to me because it forces me to slow down, to take the time to really see the world from another person’s perspective.”

source: people.com