Source

• Born: 29 January 1954
• Birthplace: Kosciusko, Mississippi
• Best Known As: Host of TV's Oprah

Orpah Winfrey is the most successful female talk show host in American TV history. She went into broadcasting in the early 1970s; after anchoring and reporting TV news in Nashville, Tennessee and Baltimore, Maryland, she landed a job on the morning show of A.M. Chicago in 1984. The next year she made her movie debut in The Color Purple (based on the Alice Walker book) and was nominated for an Oscar. In 1986 she launched The Oprah Winfrey Show, a TV talk show which featured celebrity interviews and discussions of social issues. The show was a smash hit and within a decade she was one of the richest women in the United States. "Oprah's Book Club," a feature of her show highlighting new books, became famous for its ability to create bestsellers. In 2000 she launched her own lifestyle magazine, O.

Winfrey launched the career of relationship specialist Dr. Phil, who became famous while making regular guest appearances on her show... Oprah's production company is named Harpo Productions -- "Oprah" spelled backwards... In a 1991 interview with the Academy of Achievement, Winfrey said that her name was spelled "Orpah" on her birth certificate, but that she has always been called Oprah instead.

(1954–)

Producer, chief executive officer, and chairman, Harpo Productions

Nationality: American.

Born: January 29, 1954, in Kosciusko, Mississippi.

Education: Attended Tennessee State University.

Family: Daughter of Vernon Winfrey (sailor and barber) and Vernita Lee (maid and dietician).

Career: WVOL Radio (Nashville), 1971–1972, news reader; WTVF-TV (Nashville), 1973–1976, news anchor and reporter; WJZ-TV (Baltimore), 1976–1977, news anchor; 1977–1983, talk show host; WLS-TV (Chicago), 1984, talk show host; King World Productions, 1985–, host of the Oprah Winfrey Show; Harpo Productions, 1986–, producer, chief executive officer, and chairman; Oxygen Media, 1998–, partner; Hearst Magazines, 2000–, editorial director of O: The Oprah Magazine.

Awards: Woman of Achievement Award, National Organization for Women, 1986; named one of the Ten Most Admired Women, Playgirl, 1986; Emmy Award for best daytime talk show host, Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, 1987, 1991, 1992, 1994, 1995, and 1997; named Broadcaster of the Year, International Radio and Television Society, 1988; Entertainer of the Year Award, NAACP, 1989; Image Award, NAACP, 1989, 1991, 1992, and 1994; Industry Achievement Award, Broadcast Promotion Marketing Executives/Broadcast Design Association, 1991; Horatio Alger Award, Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, 1993; named to the Television Academy Hall of Fame, Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, 1994; Gold Medal, International Television and Radio Society, 1996; Lifetime Achievement Award, Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, 1998; National Book Awards 50th Anniversary Gold Medal, National Book Foundation, 1999; Bob Hope Humanitarian Award, 2002; named to the Hall of Fame, Broadcasting & Cable, 2002.

Publications: Make the Connection: Ten Steps to a Better Body—and a Better Life (with Bob Greene), 1996; The Uncommon Wisdom of Oprah Winfrey: A Portrait in Her Own Words (edited by Bill Adler), 1996; Journey to

Beloved, 1998; Oprah Winfrey Speaks: Insight from the World's Most Influential Voice (edited by Janet Lowe), 1998.

Address: Harpo Productions, 110 North Carpenter Street, Chicago, Illinois 60607-2145; http://www.oprah.com.

Coming from life in a home with no electricity or running water and having suffered misery and severe abuse, Oprah Gail Winfrey became one of the most influential people in history as host of The Oprah Winfrey Show, which reached more than 20 million Americans five days a week and tens of millions more in 107 other countries. By age 49 she was a self-made billionaire, ruler of a vast entertainment and communications empire. Indeed, she was a symbol of what an individual person could achieve in America, and around the world were people who, when asked, declared that the person they most wished to be like was "Oprah Winfrey."

Misery

Winfrey was born out of wedlock to an impoverished young woman, Vernita Lee, in Mississippi at a time when segregation in that state denied basic civil rights to African Americans. Her mother named several different men as potential fathers to Winfrey, but only one man, Vernon Winfrey, a sailor in the U.S. Navy, took responsibility for the child. Throughout her life, Winfrey would refuse to have the tests done that would determine whether Vernon was her biological father.

Lee left her baby daughter with her own mother, the owner of a remote pig farm. Her grandmother provided Winfrey with a stern disciplinary environment in which church played a big role. In 1956 Winfrey astonished church members by delivering a reading and interpretation of a part of the Bible. Her grandmother had taught her to read, and reading would always be a source of inspiration and solace for Winfrey. In 1960 she was sent from the farm that lacked electricity and running water to her mother's Milwaukee home, which was tiny; Winfrey missed being able to play with animals but kept roaches as pets. Unable to care for her daughter, Lee soon sent her to Nashville to live with her father and his wife, Zelma, who loved the little girl. When Lee asked to have her daughter back for a summer's visit, the Winfreys reluctantly let her go; she would not return until 1968.

At first, Winfrey did well in school; she skipped over kindergarten to first grade and then over second grade to third grade. But in 1963 Winfrey was raped by a 19-year-old cousin; at least two other relatives molested her. To encourage boys to like her, she was sexually promiscuous. She was very rebellious; her mother tried to have her put in juvenile hall, which had no room to spare, so she sent Winfrey back to her father. At 14, Winfrey became pregnant, and, at first, she named several possible fathers. Eventually she insisted the father had to be her own father's brother. The baby was stillborn. Her father was a remarkable man, who accepted Winfrey as his daughter without question and who made it clear to her that he wanted her to be his daughter. He and his wife gave Winfrey a disciplined home environment. She was required to read books and, every two weeks, to write a report about what she had read, instilling a habit of reading that Winfrey continued for the rest of her life. She had to wear conservative, standard schoolgirl clothing at all times, to do her homework, and to behave respectfully toward grownups. Winfrey would often tell others that her father had saved her life.

Talking for a Living

Even as a small child, Winfrey would say that she wanted to make her living by talking, for she was a gifted, quick-witted speaker. In 1971, partly on the basis of her brilliant public speaking, she won the Miss Nashville Fire Prevention beauty and talent contest, which led to a job reading the news at the WVOL radio station. She chafed under her father and stepmother's curfew rules, because she was earning $15,000 per year—a good salary at the time—and felt that she was demonstrating grownup responsibility. Even after she took a job anchoring the news broadcasts of Nashville's WTVF-TV, the restrictions required by her parents remained. When, in 1976, Baltimore's WJZ-TV offered her a job anchoring the news, she leaped at the chance. She was a senior at Tennessee State University with only a few months to go for her degree, but as a friend pointed out to her, the WJZ-TV job was the chance of a lifetime. Her bosses at WJZ-TV wanted her to have plastic surgery to move her eyes closer together and to narrow her nose (she refused). They sent her to a hairdresser to make her hair more chic; the hairdresser burned the hair off her head, making her bald save for three little hairs over her forehead; her head proved too big for wigs, so she wore scarves while she was on the air, until her hair grew back.

In 1977 she was switched to cohosting a morning talk show; her gift of gab and her knack for asking the questions most listeners wanted to have answered turned the show into a hit. In 1984 her producer at WJZ-TV, Debra DiMaio, took a job in Chicago at WLS-TV. She brought with her a tape of Winfrey at work and showed it to Dennis Swanson, who immediately wanted to hire Winfrey to host the morning talk show A.M. Chicago. Winfrey was afraid that a heavyset black woman would be unwelcome on television in Chicago, which had a reputation for racial conflict, but Swanson insisted. Winfrey accepted the job, and WJZ-TV let her out of her contract. She then visited a Chicago lawyer, Jeff Jacobs, to gain his help with her contract negotiations; he became her lifelong adviser and business manager. Smart, honest, and devoted to Winfrey's well-being, he had a hand in all of her business dealings from 1984 onward. Within four weeks, opposite the dominating Donahue talk show (with host Phil Donahue), Winfrey's show went from last in the ratings in Chicago to first for its time slot. She had shown that her appeal transcended ethnicity.

Going National

The year 1985 was momentous for Winfrey. Her talk show was renamed The Oprah Winfrey Show, and Jacobs negotiated a national syndication deal with the owners of syndication company King World, Mike and Roger King, two persuasive salesmen who quickly sold the show to 138 stations in the United States. Jacobs got Winfrey 25 percent of the gross King World made from the show, and from a salary of $230,000 per year at WLS-TV, Winfrey's income leaped to over $30 million for her first year in syndication. Also in 1986 The Color Purple, a motion picture based on one of her favorite books, came out. In it, she played Sofia, and her dazzling performance received Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations for best supporting actress, although she did not win.

She played the mother of the protagonist in the motion picture Native Son; though she was praised for her performance by critics, she was unhappy with the motion picture, which quickly died at the box office. Wanting to control the content of her productions, in 1986 Winfrey founded Harpo Productions, giving a 5 percent share to Jacobs. ("Harpo" was "Oprah" spelled backward.) This studio was set up in a former ice-skating rink and became a large production company that made motion pictures and miniseries for the ABC network and eventually produced The Oprah Winfrey Show. It was in May 1986 that she met Stedman Graham Jr., a tall, movie-star-handsome, successful businessman, and the two fell in love. Although they announced their engagement in 1992, they did not marry.

In 1989 Winfrey made Jacobs president of Harpo. Like Winfrey, he had a great deal of common sense, and he gave the young business stability. That year Winfrey produced and acted in the television miniseries The Women of Brewster Place, based on one of her favorite novels. It did well, and a dramatic series Brewster Place starring Winfrey was spun off in 1990, but it failed after only a few episodes were aired.

Empire

In 1992 Winfrey began a series of prime-time specials called Oprah: Behind the Scenes, about Winfrey's interviews of famous people. In a separately produced show, syndicated to more than 50 countries by King World, Winfrey interviewed the singer Michael Jackson for prime time; the interview aired February 10, 1993, and 39 percent of American homes tuned in to the show. Winfrey typically hired friends for jobs at Harpo Productions, people whose characters she knew and whom she trusted. This may be why by 2000 her top 10 executives each had logged over 10 years' employment at Harpo Productions. One such friend was Tim Bennett, who had been program director for Chicago's WLS-TV when Oprah first worked there. Bennett became chief operations officer for Harpo Productions, and he organized the company into departments and clarified the company's capital structure.

Ever since coming to Chicago, Winfrey had given 10 percent of her income to charities, mostly having to do with youths, education, and books. In 1996 she began Oprah's Book Club to promote reading, for which she recommended a recently published book each month. One show each month would focus discussion on the book. Such was her influence that within minutes of her recommendations, booksellers would be swamped with orders for the books; sales for the books typically increased by 500,000 to one million copies, and previously obscure authors would become major literary figures. In 2000 Winfrey began O: The Oprah Magazine, which topped two million in circulation. In 2001 the magazine grossed over $140 million. On April 4, 2002, Winfrey announced that she was exhausted by reading so many books to single out ones to recommend, and she ended her book club, but in March 2003 she announced that she was going to start a classics book club, featuring three authors per year. She called it "Traveling with the Classics." In 2002 Harpo Productions began producing Dr. Phil, featuring a forensic psychiatrist who had frequently appeared on Winfrey's show as a family counselor, becoming a fixture. In 2003 her personal fortune topped $1 billion.

Sources for Further Information

Mair, George, Oprah Winfrey: The Real Story, New York: Birch Lane Press, 1994.

Sellers, Patricia, "The Business of Being Oprah: She Talked Her Way to the Top of Her Own Media Empire and Amassed a $1 Billion Fortune: Now She's Asking, 'What's Next?'" Fortune, April 1, 2002, pp. 50–64.

—Kirk H. Beetz

• Born: Jan 29, 1954 in Kosciusko, Mississippi
• Occupation: Actor
• Active: '80s-2000s
• Major Genres: Drama, History
• Career Highlights: The Women of Brewster Place, Tuesdays With Morrie, The Color Purple
• First Major Screen Credit: The Color Purple (1985)

Biography

Oprah Winfrey rose from poverty and a troubled youth to become the most powerful and influential woman in television and, according to Forbes Magazine, the world's most highly paid entertainer. Though primarily recognized as a talk show hostess, Winfrey also produces and occasionally acts in television movies and feature films.

Winfrey's parents, who never married, were teens when she was born in rural Mississippi. She was originally named Orpah after a woman from the Book of Ruth but a spelling mistake on the birth certificate changed it to Oprah. She spent her childhood growing up in abject poverty on her deeply religious grandmother's farm. When she was older, Winfrey moved in with her mother in Milwaukee, WI. This proved a difficult time as Winfrey alleges she was repeatedly sexually molested by male relatives. Winfrey became a bit of a wild child during her early teens, experimenting with sex and drugs until the age of 14 when she gave birth to a premature baby. It died shortly after, and upon recovering, Winfrey chose to live with her father in Nashville. It was under his stern guidance that Winfrey found discipline, stability, and the inspiration to excel in school and change her life.

When she was 19, Winfrey became a part-time radio reporter for station WVOL, Nashville, and also began studying speech and performing arts at Tennessee State University. She dropped out in 1972 during her sophomore year to become an anchor at Nashville's WTVF-TV. She was the first black woman to hold that position. In 1976, she moved to WJZ-TV and after a stint as a reporter was promoted to co-anchor. Two years after her arrival, Winfrey was slotted (with some trepidation by producers who weren't sure how audiences would respond to a host who was neither white nor thin) to host their talk show People Are Talking. Their worries were unfounded for the charming, empathetic Winfrey's show was a hit and remained so for eight years.

In 1984, Winfrey took a major risk and accepted a job hosting a Chicago morning talk show, one that aired at the same time as the nationally top-rated, Chicago-based Phil Donahue talk show. This time it was her fears that had no basis for she soon found herself neck and neck in the ratings with Donahue. Her show also went nationwide through King World Syndicate and as she expanded the operation, the money began rolling in. With the purchase of a large downtown production facility, Winfrey was able to become the third woman in the American entertainment industry -- after Mary Pickford and Lucille Ball -- to own her own studio. She named it Harpo, which is, of course, "Oprah" spelled backwards. Using her considerable business acumen, Winfrey translated her show into a multi-million-dollar business, making her the wealthiest black woman in the U.S.

Her show was groundbreaking for several reasons, but most of all because Oprah was unafraid to bare her soul and her own past experiences in front of audiences whereas most talk show hosts remained reserved in regard to their personal lives. Though it was difficult, she made public her past abuse, her drug problem during her twenties, and her struggle with obesity. In this latter area, Oprah, took a lot of heat from unkind critics who were unable to cope with the notion that a round woman could possibly be considered attractive, intelligent, and vital. She endured cruel jokes and jibes until she finally decided to lose weight, first with a radical liquid diet -- which only temporarily took off her weight -- and then with a rigorous fat-free diet and exercise regimen that kept her weight off.

Like Donahue and the other talk show hosts of the day, Winfrey's program tended toward sensationalism designed to appeal to our most morbid curiosities. Subject-wise, she had begun hitting all-time lows by 1994. That year, she was to turn 40 and was thinking heavily about which direction her life might turn, both professionally and personally. There was a question whether or not she would even continue taping the show. She ultimately decided to stay on the air, but only after publicly promising to move her show to a higher, more uplifting level.

In addition to her reign as "queen of the daytime talk shows," Winfrey has also proven herself a gifted actress. In 1985, she received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress with her film debut as Sofia in Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple. Later, she began working behind the scenes, executive producing and starring in Donna Deitch's acclaimed 1989 television movie The Women of Brewster Place, which later became a short-lived series.

After the success of her book club, Winfrey began producing popular films based on some of her favorite contemporary written works. Along with executive-producing made-for-television adaptations such as David and Lisa, Tuesdays with Morrie, and Oprah Winfrey Presents: The Wedding, she served as producer on the 1998 big-screen adaptation of Toni Morrison's Beloved, a film she also costarred in.

Winfrey continued to be a powerful force in the world of day-time television in 2003, when she spun off a regular segment from her show featuring psychologist Dr. Phil McGraw into McGraw's own daily program, Dr. Phil. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

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America's first lady of talk shows, Oprah Gail Winfrey (born 1954), is well known for surpassing her competition to become the most watched daytimeshow host on television. Her natural style with guests and audiences on the "Oprah Winfrey Show" earned her widespread adoration, as well as her own production company.

Oprah Gail Winfrey was born to Vernita Lee and Vernon Winfrey on an isolated farm in Kosciusko, Mississippi, on January 29, 1954. Her name was supposed to be Orpah, from the Bible, but because of the difficulty of spelling and pronunciation, she was known as Oprah almost from birth. Winfrey's unmarried parents separated soon after she was born and left her in the care of her maternal grandmother on the farm.

Winfrey made friends with the farm animals and, under the strict guidance of her grandmother, she learned to read at two and a half years old. She addressed her church congregation about "when Jesus rose on Easter Day" when she was two years old. Then Winfrey skipped kindergarten after writing a note to her teacher on the first day of school saying she belonged in the first grade. She was promoted to third grade after that year.

It was her last year on the farm; at six years old she was sent north to join her mother and two half-brothers in the Milwaukee ghetto. Because she missed the farm animals and could not afford a dog, she made pets out of cockroaches and kept them in a jar. Her career as a young speaker continued with poetry readings at African American social clubs and church teas. At 12 years old she was staying with her father in Nashville and earned $500 for a speech at a church. She knew then that she wanted to be "paid to talk."

The poor, urban lifestyle had its negative effect on Winfrey as a young teenager, and her problems were compounded by repeated sexual abuse, starting at age nine, by men that others in her family trusted. Her mother worked strenuously at odd jobs and did not have much time for supervision.

Winfrey became a delinquent teenager, frequently acting out and crying for attention. Once she faked a robbery in her house, smashed her glasses, feigned amnesia, and stole from her mother's purse, all because she wanted newer, more stylish glasses. Another time she spotted Aretha Franklin getting out of a car and convinced her she was a poor orphan from Ohio looking for a way back home. Franklin gave her $100, with which Winfrey rented herself a hotel room for three days until a minister brought her home. Her mother tried to send her to a detention center only to discover there was no room; so she sent her troubled daughter to live with her father in Nashville.

Winfrey said her father saved her life. He was very strict and provided her with guidance, structure, rules, and books. He required his daughter to complete weekly book reports, and she went without dinner until she learned five new vocabulary words each day.

She became an excellent student, participating as well in the drama club, debate club, and student council. In an Elks Club oratorical contest, she won a full scholarship to Tennessee State University. The following year she was invited to a White House Conference on Youth. Winfrey was crowned Miss Fire Prevention by WVOL, a local Nashville radio station, and was hired by that station to read afternoon newscasts.

During her freshman year at Tennessee State, Winfrey became Miss Black Nashville and Miss Tennessee. The Nashville CBS affiliate offered her a job; Winfrey turned it down twice, but finally took the advice of a speech teacher, who reminded her that job offers from CBS were "the reason people go to college." Now seen each evening on WTVFTV, Winfrey was Nashville's first African American female co-anchor of the evening news. She was 19 years old and still a sophomore in college.

When she graduated in 1976, she went to Baltimore to become a reporter and co-anchor at ABC affiliate WJZ-TV. The station sent her to New York for a beauty overhaul, which Winfrey attributes to her assistant news director's attempt to "make her Puerto Rican" and from an incident when she was told her "hair's too thick, nose is too wide, and chin's too big." The New York salon only made things worse by giving her a bad permanent, leaving her temporarily bald and depressed. Winfrey comforted herself with food; so began the weight problem that became so much a part of her persona.

In 1977 WJZ-TV scheduled her to do the local news updates, called cut-ins, during Good Morning, America, and soon she was moved to the morning talk show Baltimore Is Talking with co-host Richard Sher. After seven years on the show, the general manager of WLS-TV, ABC's Chicago affiliate, saw Winfrey in an audition tape sent in by her producer, Debra DiMaio. At the time her ratings in Baltimore were better than Phil Donahue's, and she and DiMaio were hired.

Winfrey moved to Chicago in January 1984 and took over as anchor on A.M. Chicago, a morning talk show which was consistently last in the ratings. She changed the emphasis of the show from traditional women's issues to current and controversial topics, and after one month the show was even with Donahue's program. Three months later it had inched ahead. In September 1985 the program, renamed the Oprah Winfrey Show, was expanded to one hour. Consequently, Donahue moved to New York.

One of the reasons her show became so successful was she decided against using stifling prepared scripts. She refused to research her topics, and, in her own words, she "wings it" in order to carry on normal conversations with her guests. It succeeds because of her sharp personality and quick wit.

In 1985 Quincy Jones saw Winfrey on television and thought she would make a fine actress in a movie he was co-producing with director Stephen Spielberg. The film was based on the Alice Walker novel The Color Purple. Her only acting experience until then had been in a one-woman show, The History of Black Women Through Drama and Song, which she performed during an African American theater festival in 1978.

Winfrey was cast as Sofia, a proud, assertive woman whose spirit is broken by neither an abusive husband nor white authorities. Critics praised her performance, and she was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress.

In 1986 she appeared in Jerrold Freedman's film of Richard Wright's Native Son, playing the crucial role of Bigger Thomas' mother. The film was not as well received as The Color Purple, and critics considered Winfrey's performance overly sentimental.

The popularity of Winfrey's show skyrocketed after the success of The Color Purple, and in September 1985 the distributor King World bought the syndication rights to air the program in 138 cities, a record for first-time syndication. That year, although Donahue was being aired on 200 stations, Winfrey won her time slot by 31 percent, drew twice the Chicago audience as Donahue, and carried the top ten markets in the United States.

The Oprah Winfrey Show featured such topics and guests as a group of nudists without clothing in the studio (with only their faces shown), a live birth, white supremacists, transsexuals, pet death, gorgeous men, well-dressed women, and Winfrey's own struggle with her weight and coming to terms with the abuse she endured as a child. She holds interviewees' hands during difficult discussions and often breaks into tears right along with them. One show's topic was incest, during which she revealed to her audience she had been raped by a cousin when she was nine years old.

She once taped a show with an all-white audience in Forsyth County, Georgia, where no African American had lived since 1912. This program was prompted after an incident on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, when 20,000 people marched in Forsyth County to protest racism after the Ku Klux Klan had broken up a previous civil rights march in that town. Another program featured a man who had contracted AIDS and as a result had been harassed, beaten, jailed, and run out of his hometown. The studio audience was made up of the residents of that town.

In 1986 she received a special award from the Chicago Academy for the Arts for unique contributions to the city's artistic community and was named Woman of Achievement by the National Organization of Women. The Oprah Winfrey Show won several Emmys for Best Talk Show, and Winfrey was honored as Best Talk Show Host.

Winfrey formed her own production company, Harpo, Inc., in August 1986 in order to produce the topics that she wanted to see produced, including the television drama miniseries based on Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place, in which Winfrey was featured, along with Cicely Tyson, Robin Givens, Olivia Cole, Jackee, Paula Kelly, and Lynn Whitfield. The miniseries aired in March 1989, and a regular series called Brewster Place, also starring Winfrey, debuted on ABC in May 1990. Winfrey also owned the screen rights to Kaffir Boy, Mark Mathabane's autobiographical book about growing up under apartheid in South Africa, as well as Toni Morrison's novel Beloved.

Winfrey is also politically active. In 1991 the tragic story of a four-year-old Chicago girl's molestation and murder prompted Winfrey, as a former abuse victim, "to take a stand for the children of this country," she explained in People. With the help of former Illinois governor James Thompson, she proposed federal child protection legislation designed to keep nationwide records on convicted child abusers. In addition, Winfrey pursued a ruling that would guarantee strict sentencing of individuals convicted of child abuse.

In September 1996 Winfrey started an on-air reading club. For 10 years publishers had watched as self-help, inspirational, and celebrity titles rose to best-seller status on the tides of telegenic emotion flooding each day across the screens of Winfrey's 14 million American viewers. Think of Simple Abundance, The Soul's Code, Don't Block the Blessings, Down in the Garden, and Winfrey's own Make the Connection, written with Bob Greene. They all received their sales starts because of Winfrey's reading club. The book club has taken her power to sell books to a different level. On September 17 Winfrey stood up in an evangelist mode and announced she wanted ''to get the country reading." She told her adoring fans to hasten to the stores to buy the book she had chosen. They would then discuss it together on the air the following month.

The initial reaction was astonishing. The Deep End of the Ocean had generated significant sales for a first novel; 68,000 copies had gone into the stores since June. But between the last week in August, when Winfrey told her plans to the publisher, and the September on-air announcement, Viking printed 90,000 more. By the time the discussion was broadcast on October 18, there were 750,000 copies in print. The book became a number one best-seller, and another 100,000 were printed before February 1997.

The club ensured Winfrey as the most powerful book marketer in the United States. She sends more people to bookstores than morning news programs, other daytime shows, evening magazines, radio shows, print reviews and feature articles combined. As of May 1997, Make the Connection was rated number nine on the New York Times Best Seller List.

On April 30, 1997, Winfrey appeared in the role of a therapist on a controversial episode of the sitcom Ellen, in which the show's character reveals her homosexuality. The controversey deepened when the show's star, comedian Ellen DeGeneres, announced that she herself was a lesbian. As a result, rumors quickly spread questioning Winfrey's sexuality. Distressed by the rumors, Winfrey issued a statement declaring that she is heterosexual.

Although one of the wealthiest women in America and the highest paid entertainer in the world, Winfrey has made generous contributions to charitable organizations and institutions such as Morehouse College, the Harold Washington Library, The United Negro College Fund, and Tennesse State University.

In addition to her numerous Daytime Emmys, Winfrey has received other awards. She was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in 1994 and received the George Foster Peabody Individual Achievement Award following the 1995-1996 season, one of broadcasting's most coveted awards. Further, she received the IRTS Gold Medal Award, was named one of "Americas's 25 Most Influential People of 1996" by Time magazine, and was included on Marjabelle Young Stewart's 1996 list of most polite celebrities. In 1997 Winfrey received TV Guide's Television Performer of the Year Award and was named favorite Female Television Performer at the 1997 People's Choice Awards.

Winfrey lives in a condominium on Chicago's Gold Coast and owns a 162-acre farm in Indiana. She spends four nights a week lecturing for free at churches, shelters, and youth organizations. Winfrey also spends two Saturdays a month with the Little Sisters program she set up at Chicago's Cabrini-Green housing project.

Further Reading

Three informative and anecdotal books have been written about Oprah Winfrey: Everybody Loves Oprah! (1987) by Norman King, Oprah (1987) by Robert Waldron, and Oprah Winfrey by Lillie Patterson (1988). "The Importance of Being Oprah," a June 11, 1989, feature story in the New York Times Magazine by Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, is an excellent in-depth profile of Winfrey. She is the subject of countless magazine articles in the popular media.

television talk show host; broadcasting and media executive; actress

Personal Information

Born Orpah Gail Winfrey (given name changed to Oprah as an infant), January 29, 1954, in Kosciusko, MS; daughter of Vernon Winfrey (a barber, grocery store owner, and city councilman) and Vernita Lee (a housecleaner); engaged to Stedman Graham; children: one son (deceased).
Education: Received B.A. from Tennessee State University.

Career

WVOL (radio station), Nashville, TN, part-time radio newscaster, 1971; WTVF-TV, Nashville, reporter and anchor, beginning 1973; WJZ-TV, Baltimore, MD, news anchor, 1976-77, cohost of morning show People Are Talking, 1977-83; host of WLS-TV talk show AM Chicago, beginning 1984, nationally syndicated as the Oprah Winfrey Show, ABC-TV, 1986--; host of Oprah After the Show, Oxygen, 2002--. Appeared in films The Color Purple, 1985, Native Son, 1987, There Are No Children Here, 1993. Founder of Harpo Productions, Inc., 1988. Coexecutive producer and actress in television miniseries The Women of Brewster Place, ABC, 1989, and in weekly television series based on the miniseries, 1990. Owns the screen rights to Toni Morrison's novel Beloved and Mark Mathabane's novel Kaffir Boy. Part-owner of three network affiliated stations; Co-author of "Make the Connection: Ten Steps to a Better Body-And a Better Life," 1996; Actress on television sitcom Ellen, 1997; publisher of O. The Oprah Magazine, a magazine for women, 2000--.

Life's Work

Oprah Winfrey, a multi-millionaire businesswoman with her own national top-rated talk show and Chicago-based movie production company called Harpo Productions, Inc., is one of the most affluent and powerful black women in America. Deemed the undisputed "Queen of Talk" since the mid-1980s, she is the first black woman to host a nationally syndicated weekday talk show.

Winfrey was born January 29, 1954, on a farm in Kosciusko, Mississippi, the product of a fleeting tryst between 20-year-old Vernon Winfrey and 18-year-old Vernita Lee. Since her father was in the service when she was born and her mother was eager to leave Mississippi, Winfrey lived on the farm with her maternal grandparents until the age of six. Her father apparently learned of her birth when he received a printed baby announcement in the mail with a scribbled note: "Send clothes!" Originally named "Orpah," from the book of Ruth in the Bible, Winfrey came to be known as "Oprah" shortly after her birth because of the difficulty most people had spelling and pronouncing "Orpah" properly.

By the age of three, Winfrey was reciting in church on holidays, and the locals quickly perceived her as "gifted." While in kindergarten, she reportedly wrote to her teacher requesting that she be moved to the first grade. The next day she was skipped ahead a grade.

Winfrey formed her spiritual values and learned both discipline and drama in the southern Baptist church. As a young child, she was raised in the rural tradition, receiving whippings and harsh chastisement as punishment for wrongdoing. At the age of six, she moved to Milwaukee to live with her mother, who was working as a housecleaner. Rarely at home because of work demands, Vernita Winfrey had a difficult time providing for the emotional needs of the intelligent, high-spirited Oprah. Several sources have documented the imaginative stories Winfrey apparently concocted to capture her mother's attention. Once, when her mother refused to buy her a new pair of eyeglasses--claiming that she couldn't afford them--Winfrey staged a fake burglary at her home, alleging that she had been knocked unconscious, and during the ordeal her glasses had broken. Another time, she ran away from home, approached Aretha Franklin's limousine, and convinced the singer that she was an abandoned child. Franklin is said to have given her one hundred dollars. Winfrey's last antic involved her frantic attempt to keep an un-housebroken puppy: she invented a tale about the courageous puppy fending off robbers and even added a bit of realism to the "scene" by tossing her mother's jewelry out of the window.

At the age of nine, and for several years thereafter, Winfrey was sexually abused by a teenage cousin, and then by other male relatives and friends. She spoke openly about this on her talk show in 1991, lending support and showing empathy to guests and viewers who had endured similar painful experiences. In an article for Essence she admitted that she couldn't free herself of the "shame" she felt until 1990, when she finally admitted, "I was not responsible for the abuse." The molestation Winfrey experienced in Milwaukee ended when, at the age of 14, she went to live with her father in Nashville, where she flourished under his care and honed many of her communication skills. Winfrey grew up a Baptist, but left organized religion behind as an adult. As she told Chicago Magazine: "I have church with myself; I have church walking down the street. I believe in one God force that lives inside all of us, and once you tap into that, you can do anything."

Winf rey credits her father, and the time she spent with him and his wife Zelma, for "saving" her. He functioned as a strict and constant presence in her life. She told Jill Nelson in an interview for Washington Post Magazine, "If I hadn't been sent to my father, I would have gone in another direction. I could have made a good criminal. I would have used these same instincts differently."

Winfrey's life under her father's care was purposeful and disciplined. A barber, an elected city councilman, a grocery store owner, and a deacon in his church, Vernon Winfrey was a high achiever who expected responsible behavior from his daughter. Gone were Oprah's days of heavily applied make-up, revealing dresses, and broken curfews. She was expected to maintain top grades. Zelma Winfrey took her to the library every two weeks, where she had to choose five books, read them, and then write book reports for her family. Vernon rightly viewed education as the key to success, and Oprah clearly reaped the benefits of his guidance.

Winfrey joined the drama club in school and became a prizewinning orator, winning a $1,000 college scholarship after a two-and-a-half minute speech titled "The Negro, the Constitution, and the United States," delivered before 10,000 Elks in Philadelphia. She was the first black person to win Nashville's Miss Fire Prevention title. In 1971, she became a part-time radio newscaster on Nashville's WVOL. That same year, she was named Miss Black Tennessee. In 1973, when she was only 19 and still attending Tennessee State University, Winfrey was hired by WTVF-TV, the CBS affiliate in Nashville, as a reporter and anchor. In 1987, she set up a $750,000 fund to provide ten scholarships to her alma mater and followed up with letters to each recipient, challenging a few of them to boost their grades. "My mission is to use this position, power and money to create opportunities for other people," she told Richard Zoglin in Time.

From WTVF-TV, Winfrey moved to Baltimore's WJZ-TV--an ABC affiliate--from 1976 to 1983. She started out as a news anchor but was soon fired. As she told Zoglin, "I had no business anchoring the news in a major market." After being given another chance as co-host of a Baltimore morning show called People Are Talking, Winfrey found her niche in the business. "I said to myself 'This is what I should be doing. It's like breathing,'" she recalled to Zoglin. Although the ratings soared, Winfrey experienced personal problems and began overeating as a result. The station wanted to change both her name and her look. She was apparently told that her eyes were too far apart, her nose was too wide, and her chin was too long. In an attempt to thin out her hair, she underwent what turned out to be a botched French permanent at an expensive hair salon and was rendered temporarily bald.

In spite of Winfrey's perceived "shortcomings," the ratings for People Are Talking continued to increase and so did Winfrey's size. By the time she left Baltimore for WLS-TV's AM Chicago in 1984, she weighed 160 pounds. After her experience with the broadcasting executives in Baltimore, Winfrey resolved not to let anyone manipulate her appearance or personality again.

Winfrey took over the ailing Chicago television talk show AM Chicago in January of 1984 and instantly turned it into a smash hit, besting even the successful Phil Donahue Show in the ratings. When the Chicago-based ABC affiliate WLS-TV put the little-known Winfrey against Phil Donahue in the 9 a.m. slot, the odds against her were formidable. Then standing 5 feet 6 inches and weighing 180 pounds, she seemed an unlikely contender for a television idol, but her earthy, down-home, comfortable style captivated audiences. She even studied improvisation with Chicago's Second City comedy troupe to polish her instinctive flair for entertainment. Where Phil Donahue might have probed the morality of a pornographic actress, Winfrey would simply blurt out "Don't you get sore?" She automatically asks the questions her television viewers want to ask--frequently tossing aside propriety--yet always remains warm and empathetic. Her show was quickly syndicated to television stations in more than 120 American cities. Within a year after she arrived, Phil Donahue relocated to New York City, and his show was switched to an afternoon spot, thus avoiding head-on competition with the Oprah Winfrey Show.

In 1985, producer Quincy Jones was in Chicago to testify in a lawsuit and watched Winfrey's show from his hotel room. He immediately arranged an audition for her for the role of Sophia in the screen adaptation of Alice Walker's novel The Color Purple. His faith in her acting abilities proved well placed, as Winfrey's acting debut merited her nominations for both a Golden Globe and an Academy Award for best supporting actress. In addition to The Color Purple, Winfrey's other movie credits include the 1986 film Native Son, and the 1993 made-for-TV movie There Are No Children Here, in which Winfrey played the role of a single mother struggling to raise her family in a tough Chicago housing project.

In September of 1986, the Oprah Winfrey Show made its national debut, entering the talk show wars in earnest. Within five months it was the third highest rated show in syndication--after the gameshows Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy!--and the number one talk show, reaching between 9 and 10 million people daily in 192 cities at that time. Winfrey and her show have received numerous Daytime Emmy awards for excellence in the talk/service broadcasting field.

In addition to owning and producing the Oprah Winfrey Show, the broadcasting executive spins grand ventures from her Chicago-based company, Harpo Productions, Inc. (Harpo is Oprah spelled backwards.) Harpo Productions, which reaped at least $50 million during the 1988-89 season, took over the ownership and production of the Oprah Winfrey Show in 1988 from Chicago's WLS-TV. Having let ABC know that she was considering discontinuing her show at the end of her original contract so she could pursue other interests, Winfrey ended up gaining the control she wanted and went on to become the first black woman to own her own television and film production complex. By 1991, Winfrey was earning a whopping $80 million and came in third on Forbes magazine's 1990-91 list of the richest entertainers in the business. She told Ms. magazine that making a difference in the lives of others is key to her master plan and noted, "I'm starting a minority training program ... specifically to bring more people of color into the film and television industry as producers."

Jeffrey Jacobs, Winfrey's lawyer-manager and chief adviser, told Ms.: "Because of our economic status, and because of Oprah's other talents, we're going to bring things to the screen that no one else will be able to do.... She can develop or buy something that no one else will think is commercially viable--because she thinks the message is important and people should see it.... If we can make money, great. And if we don't, well, there are other reasons to do projects besides making money".

In 1989 Winfrey coproduced and starred in the Harpo endeavor The Women of Brewster Place, a miniseries based upon Gloria Naylor's award-winning novel about a group of ghetto-based women. The strong female cast and solid script earned the show considerable acclaim, and Winfrey decided to follow it up the next year with a weekly television show based on the same characters. But the series was canceled in its first season. "I could hear my inner voice telling me it wasn't time, don't do it," she revealed in Essence. "People around me whom I love and trust advised me to wait until I was sure everything was ready, but I thought I could make it all right because I wanted it to be all right.... I thought I could make it happen on the strength of my own will. I was doing two Oprah Winfrey shows a day and then taping Brewster Place at night.... I was physically and emotionally exhausted. When Brewster Place was canceled, I felt disappointed for everyone else. But for myself? I felt relief."

Around the same time, Winfrey, who has battled a weight problem since 1977, began to gain back most of the 67 pounds she had lost on a much celebrated medically supervised liquid diet. "When I started gaining the weight back, I felt I had let people down, and that triggered my greatest fear in life: the fear of not being liked, of not being good enough," she explained in an article for Essence. Winfrey's weight difficulties seem to have stemmed from her continued use of food as a stress reliever. "My greatest failure was in believing that the weight issue just about weight," she later admitted in People.

In coming to understand the reasons for her weight problem and in finally coming to grips with the abuse she endured as a child, Winfrey has been able to move forward both personally and professionally with more gusto than ever. She owns the screen rights to Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning tale of slavery, Beloved--she intends to play the title role in the film adaptation--and to Kaffir Boy, the anti-apartheid autobiography of South African writer Mark Mathabane. Her additional endeavors include part-ownership of three network affiliated stations, and she has an interest in a Chicago restaurant called The Eccentric. She has also set up a "Little Sisters" program in Chicago's Cabrini-Green housing projects and attempts to answer many of the two thousand letters that pour into her studio weekly. An active fund-raiser who is notoriously generous with her staff and friends, Winfrey gives dozens of speeches every year, dousing them with her practiced wit, evangelical anecdotal flair, and recognizable fervor.

Winfrey is also politically active. In 1991, the tragic story of a four-year-old Chicago girl's molestation and murder prompted her--as a former abuse victim--"to take a stand for the children of this country," she explained in People. With the help of former Illinois governor James Thompson, she proposed federal child protection legislation designed to keep nationwide records on convicted child abusers. Winfrey's efforts on behalf of abused and neglected children came to fruition on December 20, 1993, when President Bill Clinton signed the national "Oprah Bill" into law. This bill guarantees strict sentencing of individuals convicted of child abuse.

Although Winfrey is one of the wealthiest women in America, she has become noted for her generous contributions to charitable organizations and institutions such as Morehouse College, the Harold Washington Library, The United Negro College Fund, and her alma mater, Tennessee State University. In 1994, Winfrey announced that she would commit $6 million dollars to Families for a Better Life, a program designed to help 100 families get out of Chicago public housing, off welfare rolls, and into their own apartments or homes. Despite this lofty goal, only five families had completed the program by August of 1996 and the project was put on hold.

Oprah shocked many of her viewers in January of 1995 when, during a show about women who used drugs, she admitted that she had smoked crack cocaine with a boyfriend during the 1970s. Although officials at Harpo Productions, her production company, fretted about the negative impact this revelation would have on the ratings of the Oprah Winfrey Show, telling this long-held secret gave Winfrey a sense of peace and closure. "What I learned from it," she remarked to Ebony magazine, "is the thing you fear the most truly has no power. Your fear of it is what has the power. But the thing itself cannot touch you. What I learned that day is that the truth really will set you free."

In 1995, Winfrey's many fans were distressed to learn that she was considering quitting her successful talk show and moving on to other projects. King World Productions, which syndicates the Oprah Winfrey Show, announced that they had reached a deal with Winfrey that would continue distribution of the show through the 1999-2000 television season. However, the contract also gave Winfrey the option of ending the program with only one year's notice. Winfrey did not quit, but signed other extensions with King World which ensured her show would be on the air through 2011.

On October 2, 1995, America Online launched Winfrey's own on-line site entitled "Oprah Online." The tremendous success of "Oprah Online" was followed in October of 1996 with the debut on the Oprah Winfrey Show of "Oprah's Book Club." Winfrey, an avid reader, created the monthly book club as a way to encourage her viewers to read more often. Each month, she showcased a particular novel on her program and recommends it to her audience. Novels that were featured on "Oprah's Book Club" have become instant bestsellers, dramatically illustrating the tremendous influence Winfrey has with her viewers. The success of her monthly book club also prompted Winfrey to invite four women to her Chicago home to have dinner and discuss books with Toni Morrison, a Nobel Prize-winning author. The dinner with Morrison was taped for a television special entitled Dinner with Oprah, which aired on February 24, 1997 on the Lifetime cable network.

On April 30, 1997, Winfrey appeared on a controversial episode of the sitcom Ellen in which the show's character discloses that she is a lesbian. The controversy deepened when the show's star, comedian Ellen DeGeneres, announced that she herself was a lesbian. Rumors quickly circulated that Winfrey, who portrayed a therapist on the episode, was also gay. Distressed by the rumors, Winfrey issued a statement declaring that she is a heterosexual.

In addition to her numerous Daytime Emmys, Winfrey has received other awards. She was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in 1994 and at the end of the 1995-96 television season received the George Foster Peabody Individual Achievement Award, one of broadcasting's most coveted awards. She was also the recipient of the IRTS Gold Medal Award, was named one of "America's 25 Most Influential People of 1996" by Time Magazine, and included on Marjabelle Young Stewart's 1996 list of most polite celebrities. In 1997, Winfrey received TV Guide's Television Performer of the Year Award and was named favorite Female Television Performer at the 1997 People's Choice Awards. The seemingly endless parade of awards and citations continued through the turn of the century, as she received a National Book Award in 1999 and was recognized at the (Martin Luther) King Center Salute to Greatness Awards Dinner in 2000. Also in 2000 Winfrey digressed into magazine publishing with the launch of her magazine, O. The Oprah Magazine, for women; and in 2001 her name appeared on the list of the ten most influential people in publishing, as compiled by Book magazine.

O. The Oprah Magazine was a huge success for Winfrey, beyond such accolades. After launching in April 2000 with a circulation of 500,000, O increased its readership to 2.65 million in 2003. The printed word was not Winfrey's only successful venture in the early 2000s. Winfrey and her Harpo Productions began developing syndicated television programming for King World to distribute. One early success was a show featuring Dr. Phil McGraw, which began airing in 2002. King World was impressed with Winfrey's touch and decided to turn over the development of all their syndicated talk shows to Winfrey and her company. The first show under this deal was expected to air in 2006.

By 2003, Winfrey was worth over $1 billion. She used her wealth, position, and popularity for numerous social causes. In 2004, for example, she gave $5 million to Morehouse College to provide college scholarships. Winfrey had already given Morehouse $7 million in previous years. In 2005, Winfrey and other prominent African Americans lent their name and support to raising funds to build the National Museum of African-American History and Culture. The museum was to be part of the Smithsonian and located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Always interested in educational issues, Winfrey built a school in South Africa, The Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls South Africa, that was set to open in 2007.

Awards

Nashville's Miss Fire Prevention, 1971; Miss Black Tennessee, 1971; nominated for Academy Award and Golden Globe Award for best supporting actress, 1986, for role as Sophia in The Color Purple; Women of Achievement Award, National Organization for Women, 1986; Broadcaster of the Year Award, International Radio and Television Society, 1988; numerous Daytime Emmy awards for the Oprah Winfrey Show; inducted into the Television Hall of Fame, 1994; George Foster Peabody Individual Achievement Award, 1996; named to Time Magazine's "America's 25 Most Influential People," 1996; received TV Guide's Television Performer of the Year Award, 1997; People's Choice Award, 1997; Bob Hope Humanitarian Award, 2002; People's Choice Award, favorite talk show host, 2004; Candle for Lifetime Achievement in Humanitarian Service, Morehouse College, 2004; Global Leadership Award, United Nations, 2004.

Further Reading

Sources

• Atlanta Constitution, February 24, 1997.
• Black Enterprise, June 2004.
• Boston Globe, December 6, 1996.
• Brandweek, March 1, 2004.
• Broadcasting & Cable, December 13, 2004.
• Chicago Magazine, November 1985.
• Chicago Tribune, September 14, 1994; August 27, 1996.
• Daily News (New York), January 22, 1989.
• Ebony, August 1991; July 1995.
• Essence, June 1991.
• Good Housekeeping, September 1991.
• The Independent (London), January 7, 2005.
• Jet, June 5, 1989; December 18, 1989; September 17, 1990; February 18, 1991; September 30, 1991; October 7, 1991; October 17, 1994; January 29, 1996; January 27, 1997.
• Ladies' Home Journal, May 1990; August 1991.
• McCalls, August 1995.
• Ms., November 1988.
• Multichannel News, June 17, 2002.
• New York Times, July 29, 1991.
• New York Times Magazine, June 11, 1989.
• People, January 4, 1988; June 10, 1988; January 12, 1989; January 14, 1991; January 21, 1991; December 2, 1991; February 2, 2004.
• Philadelphia Inquirer, January 14, 1986.
• Time, September 15, 1986; August 8, 1988.
• Washington Post, October 22, 1994.
• Washington Post Magazine, December 14, 1986.
• US Magazine, March 20, 1989.
• USA Today, October 26, 1994; September 29, 1995.
• Additional information for this profile was obtained from America Online's "Oprah Online" site, last updated in April 1997.

— B. Kimberly Taylor and David Oblender

For more information on Oprah Winfrey, visit Britannica.com.

1954–, African-American television host, actress, and media magnate, b. Kosciusko, Miss., as Orpah Gail Winfrey, grad. Tennessee State Univ. (1976). She began her career as a Nashville radio reporter at age 17, worked in television news at 19, and moved (1976) to Baltimore to coanchor a news show. In 1977 she became cohost of a Baltimore morning chat show and in 1984 settled in Chicago to host another talk show. Her charm, easy manner, warmth, gift of gab, and unpretentious style earned the program an enthusiastic audience and soaring ratings. Soon the most popular local talk show, it was syndicated nationally in 1986, becoming the highest-rated such program. Also a talented actress, Winfrey made her motion-picture debut Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple (1985), and a variety of other movie and television roles followed.

Winfrey subsequently built a media empire. In 1988 she established Harpo Studio, a production company responsible for numerous telefilms and movies, e.g., Beloved (1998;, in which she starred). In an effort to promote reading, she founded (1996) Oprah's Book Club, which recommends books to her talk-show viewers and has produced spectacular bestsellers, making her a force in American publishing. In 1999 she established Oxygen Media, which produces women's programs on cable television and the Internet, and in 2000 she joined with the Hearst Corp. in creating O: The Oprah Magazine, a monthly women's lifestyle publication. One of the country's wealthiest women (her estimated worth in the early 2000s was well over $1 billion), Winfrey is also an active philanthropist with a particular interest in women's and children's issues and education.

Bibliography

See B. Adler, ed., The Uncommon Wisdom of Oprah Winfrey: A Portrait in Her Own Words (1997); biography by H. S. Garson (2004); study by E. Illouz (2003).

Quotes:

"Always continue the climb. It is possible for you to do whatever you choose, if you first get to know who you are and are willing to work with a power that is greater than ourselves to do it."

"I was raised to believe that excellence is the best deterrent to racism and sexism."

"My philosophy is that not only are you responsible for your life, but doing the best at this moment puts you in the best place for the next moment."

"Think like a queen. A queen is not afraid to fail. Failure is another steppingstone to greatness."

"If all this happened to you what paradigm might you develop? How might that paradigm affect you in terms of your life from that point on? What does this tell you about Abe? There are no failures, only lessons to be learned."

"Lots of people want to ride with you in the limo, but what you want is someone who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down."

See more famous quotes by Oprah Winfrey