US superstar comic Rosie O'Donnell on her Edinburgh Fringe debut

Rosie O'Donnell has several best-selling books and a way with words that surely has to owe something to the Irish gene pool on which she and her siblings floated to New York State. So she qualifies as the ideal Edinburgh Virgin.

Now she has floated right back to Ireland, unwilling to risk living in Donald Trump's America. With more than a little justification, given Donald's statements that he was “giving serious consideration to taking away” O’Donnell’s citizenship because she is “not in the best interests of our Great Country”.

However America's loss is Edinburgh's gain as the 63 year old, multi-award winning film and TV icon has been found each Wednesday for the past several months, at 6pm, honing her first ever hour at the Fringe. She and her youngest child, Clay, arrived in Ireland in January, never having lived outside the US before and not having a clue as to what it might be like or how they might be received.

When she got the offer to bring a show to Edinburgh she said yes right away, “because it was going to let me focus on something other than the politics of America”.

To be fair, O’Donnell and 'the politics of America' have never actually been best buds. She had problems with Bush, she opposed the much loved National Rifle Association and she and Trump have been less than civil for 20 years. But before and since, her career has been extraordinary. Even at school she was voted homecoming queen, prom queen, senior class president, and class clown. She spent five years as a club stand-up before being picked up by Star Search, which she won five weeks in a row. Were she not such a decent, warm, funny woman, I would be losing any liking for her at this point.

And she does love stand-up. “It is intoxicating,” she says. “The highest drug there is. To be 'making' a laugh, just you, you are the writer, you are the performer, you have the audience in the palm of your hands. You kind of feel the presence of God.”

Her stand-up career started at the age of 16 when the brother of a school friend saw her in a sketch at high school. At the time, young Rosie had plans on being an actress, a Bette Midler back-up singer on Broadway to be specific. “The fact that I couldn't sing did not deter me,” she says. But she did the gig, with no material and a room full of school friends. “I killed it,” she says. “How violent that expression is.” Second gig had no friends in the room. “I died a horrible death.” But she got a job MCing the club and learned the business through watching the other comics on the bill.

At 18 she dropped out of College to take up an offer of $250 and a bus ticket from Tickles Comedy Club in Toledo. The rest, as they say, is herstory.

She still loves stand-up but “I enjoyed it more before I was famous … when I could make cashiers laugh. Now I am well known there is the feeling that they will laugh at anything.”

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Her TV shows garnered more Emmys and Tonys and other sparkly awards than Donald Trump has had legal battles, as well as crowning her The Queen of Nice.

I ask if she thinks that when you are older you are more able to own your own mistakes and be more comfortable turning them into comedy.

“I think that with menopause and ageing comes wisdom,” she says. “You can look properly at the stew of your life, you can understand it, you can process it.” And it seems that quite a lot of this wisdom is going into her debut Edinburgh hour.

“I want to re-introduce myself as a fully grown 63-year-old woman, and not the 30-something woman they remember from movies and chat shows,” she says. She has learned, she says, “to stop blaming other people. And to stop trying to make things more palatable to you – or to an audience.”

O’Donnell wanted, from an early age, to be famous. But not for the reason you might think. At ten years old she watched her mother die from cancer. “And I thought if I was Barbra Streisand I could go on a TV show and ask everyone to send $10 and I could get money for the medication to make my mother well.”

Now she is famous, she is still driven to use celebrity to help. Since 1997 her For All Kids foundation - started with $3 of her own money - has given away more than $22 million in early child care and education programmes. “It's the main reason why I continue to push myself and my career to do more and more because of the amount that you're able to raise for charity.”

For herself, she is not driven by money, she says, as I mention the 'hit and run' performances that frequently give big name visitors to the Fringe a bad name.

“In my thirties, when I was doing the TV shows, I had an Oprah-esque deal” she says. “I am financially set for life. So leaving Trump's America has been nothing but a positive move. The rampant consumerism that has been encouraged has, she says “done damage to the soul of America”. But she has left with all her socio-political strengths and drives intact. She is horrified at the actions of Israel in Gaza. “There is blood on the hands of the United States. What we are seeing on the footage coming out of Gaza is like the images from the liberation of Auschwitz. And to deny it does a disservice to life itself.”

She is looking forward to coming to Scotland. She has been once before – to Edinburgh, in August, aged 11. Her overweening memory is of the cold. “This will be my introduction to the people of Scotland,” she says. “I would say, just come to the show with an open mind. And I am hoping the people of Scotland will be as open and welcoming as the Irish.”

Rosie O’Donnell: Common Knowledge. Gilded Balloon, 1-10 August, 8.45pm, www.gildedballoon.co.uk