Oprah's Angel Network

Oprah Gail Winfrey (; born Orpah Gail Winfrey; January 29, 1954), or simply Oprah, is an American talk show host, television producer, actress, author, and philanthropist. She is best known for her talk show, ''The Oprah Winfrey Show'', broadcast from Chicago, which ran in national syndication for 25 years, from 1986 to 2011. Dubbed the "Queen of All Media", she was the richest African-American of the 20th century and was once the world's only black billionaire. By 2007, she was sometimes ranked as the most influential woman in the world.

Winfrey was born into poverty in rural Mississippi to a single teenage mother and later raised in inner-city Milwaukee. She has stated that she was molested during her childhood and early teenage years and became pregnant at 14; her son was born prematurely and died in infancy. Winfrey was then sent to live with the man she calls her father, Vernon Winfrey, a barber in Nashville, Tennessee, and landed a job in radio while still in high school. By 19, she was a co-anchor for the local evening news. Winfrey's often emotional, extemporaneous delivery eventually led to her transfer to the daytime talk show arena, and after boosting a third-rated local Chicago talk show to first place, she launched her own production company.

By the mid-1990s, Winfrey had reinvented her show with a focus on literature, self-improvement, mindfulness, and spirituality. Though she has been criticized for unleashing a confession culture, promoting controversial self-help ideas, and having an emotion-centered approach, she has also been praised for overcoming adversity to become a benefactor to others. Winfrey also emerged as a political force in the 2008 presidential race, with her endorsement of Barack Obama estimated to have been worth about one million votes during the 2008 Democratic primaries. In 2013, Winfrey was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama and received honorary doctorate degrees from Duke and Harvard. In 2008, she formed her own network, the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN).

Credited with creating a more intimate, confessional form of media communication, Winfrey popularized and revolutionized the tabloid talk show genre pioneered by Phil Donahue. In 1994, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. Winfrey has won many accolades throughout her career which includes 18 Daytime Emmy Awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award and the Chairman's Award, two Primetime Emmy Awards, including the Bob Hope Humanitarian Award, a Tony Award, a Peabody Award and the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, awarded by the Academy Awards and two additional Academy Award nominations. Winfrey was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021.

Early life

Orpah Gail Winfrey was born on January 29, 1954; her first name was spelled ''Orpah'' on her birth certificate after the biblical figure in the Book of Ruth, but people mispronounced it regularly and "Oprah" stuck.Winfrey has said in interviews that "my name had been chosen from the Bible. My Aunt Ida had chosen the name, but nobody really knew how to spell it, so it went down as 'Orpah' on my birth certificate, but people didn't know how to pronounce it, so they put the 'P' before the 'R' in every place else other than the birth certificate. On the birth certificate it is Orpah, but then it got translated to Oprah, so here we are." She was born in Kosciusko, Mississippi, to an unmarried teenage mother. Her mother, Vernita Lee (1935–2018), was a housemaid. Winfrey's biological father is usually noted as Vernon Winfrey (c. 1933–2022), a coal miner turned barber turned city councilman who was in the Armed Forces when she was born. However, Mississippi farmer and World War II Veteran Noah Robinson Sr. (born c. 1925) has claimed to be her biological father. A genetic test in 2006 determined that her matrilineal line originated among the Kpelle ethnic group, in the area that today is Liberia. Her genetic makeup was determined to be 89% Sub-Saharan African, 8% Native American, and 3% East Asian. However, given the imprecision of genetic testing, the East Asian markers may actually be Native American.

After Winfrey's birth, her mother traveled north, and Winfrey spent her first six years living in rural poverty with her maternal grandmother, Hattie Mae (Presley) Lee (April 15, 1900 – February 27, 1963). Her grandmother was so poor that Winfrey often wore dresses made of potato sacks, for which other children made fun of her."You go, girl" "The Observer Profile: Oprah Winfrey"
''The Observer'' (UK), November 20, 2005. Her grandmother taught her to read before the age of three and took her to the local church, where she was nicknamed "The Preacher" for her ability to recite Bible verses. When Winfrey was a child, her grandmother was reportedly abusive.

At age six, Winfrey moved to an inner-city neighborhood in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with her mother, who was less supportive and encouraging than her grandmother had been, largely as a result of the long hours she worked as a maid. Around this time, Lee had given birth to another daughter, Winfrey's younger half-sister, PatriciaMair (1999) p. 12. who died of causes related to cocaine addiction in February 2003 at age 43.Garson, Helen S. ''Oprah Winfrey: A Biography'' (Greenwood, 2004), , p. 20. By 1962, Lee was having difficulty raising both daughters, so Winfrey was temporarily sent to live with Vernon in Nashville, Tennessee.Mair (1999), pp. 13–14. While Winfrey was in Nashville, Lee gave birth to a third daughter, who was put up for adoption in the hopes of easing the financial straits that had led to Lee's being on welfare, and was later also named Patricia. Winfrey did not know that she had a second half-sister until 2010.Oldenburg, Ann
"Oprah's Secret Is Out!"
''USA Today'', January 24, 2011
WebCitation archive
By the time Winfrey moved back with her mother, Lee had also given birth to Winfrey's half-brother Jeffrey, who died of AIDS-related causes in 1989. At the age of 8, she was baptized in a Baptist church.Barbranda Lumpkins Walls
Spirituality According to Oprah
aarp.org, USA, November 9, 2015

Winfrey has stated she was molested by her cousin, uncle, and a family friend, starting when she was nine years old, something she first announced on a 1986 episode of her TV show regarding sexual abuse. A biographer alleged that when Winfrey discussed the alleged abuse with family members at age 24, they reportedly refused to believe her account.Garson, Helen S
''Oprah Winfrey: A Biography''
(Greenwood, 2004), , p. 22 Winfrey once commented that she had chosen not to be a mother because she had not been mothered well. At 13, after suffering what she described as years of abuse, Winfrey ran away from home. When she was 14, she became pregnant, but her son was born prematurely and died shortly after birth. Winfrey later stated she felt betrayed by the family member who had sold the story of her son to the ''National Enquirer'' in 1990.

Winfrey attended Lincoln High School in Milwaukee, but after early success in the Upward Bound program, was transferred to the affluent suburban Nicolet High School. Upon transferring, she said she was continually reminded of her poverty as she rode the bus to school with fellow African-Americans, some of whom were servants of her classmates' families. She began to rebel and steal money from her mother in an effort to keep up with her free-spending peers. As a result, her mother once again sent her to live with Vernon in Nashville, although this time she did not take her back. Vernon was strict but encouraging, and made her education a priority. Winfrey became an honors student, was voted Most Popular Girl, and joined her high school speech team at East Nashville High School, placing second in the nation in dramatic interpretation.

Winfrey's first job as a teenager was working at a local grocery store. At the age of 17, Winfrey won the Miss Black Tennessee beauty pageant. She also attracted the attention of the local black radio station, WVOL, which hired her to do the news part-time. She worked there during her senior year of high school and in her first two years of college. She had won an oratory contest, which secured her a full scholarship to Tennessee State University, a historically black institution, where she studied communication. However, she did not deliver her final paper and receive her degree until 1987, by which time she was a successful television personality.

Winfrey's career in media would not have surprised her grandmother, who once said that ever since Winfrey could talk, she was on stage. As a child, she played games interviewing her corncob doll and the crows on the fence of her family's property. Winfrey later acknowledged her grandmother's influence, saying it was Hattie Mae who had encouraged her to speak in public and "gave me a positive sense of myself".

Television

Working in local media, Winfrey was both the youngest news anchor and the first black female news anchor at Nashville's WLAC-TV (now WTVF-TV), where she often covered the same stories as John Tesh, who worked at a competing Nashville station. In 1976, she moved to Baltimore's WJZ-TV to co-anchor the six o'clock news. In 1977, she was removed as co-anchor and worked in lower profile positions at the station. She was then recruited to join Richard Sher as co-host of WJZ's local talk show ''People Are Talking'', which premiered on August 14, 1978. She also hosted the local version of '' Dialing for Dollars''.

In 1984, Winfrey relocated to Chicago to host WLS-TV's low-rated half-hour morning talk show, ''AM Chicago'', after being hired by that station's general manager, Dennis Swanson. The first episode aired on January 2, 1984. Within months after Winfrey took over, the show went from last place in the ratings to overtaking ''Donahue'' as the highest-rated talk show in Chicago. The movie critic Roger Ebert persuaded her to sign a syndication deal with King World. Ebert predicted that she would generate 40 times as much revenue as his television show, '' At the Movies''. Formerly appeared as It was then renamed ''The Oprah Winfrey Show'' and expanded to a full hour. The first episode was broadcast nationwide on September 8, 1986. Winfrey's syndicated show brought in double Donahue's national audience, displacing Donahue as the number-one daytime talk show in America. Their much-publicized contest was the subject of enormous scrutiny. According to ''Time'' magazine in August 1988:

TV columnist Howard Rosenberg said: "She's a roundhouse, a full course meal, big, brassy, loud, aggressive, hyper, laughable, lovable, soulful, tender, low-down, earthy, and hungry. And she may know the way to Phil Donahue's jugular."Mair, George (2001) p. 97 '' Newsday''s Les Payne observed, "Oprah Winfrey is sharper than Donahue, wittier, more genuine, and far better attuned to her audience, if not the world" and Martha Bayles of ''The Wall Street Journal'' wrote, "It's a relief to see a gab-monger with a fond but realistic assessment of her own cultural and religious roots."

140px, Winfrey in 1997

In the early years of ''The Oprah Winfrey Show'', the program was classified as a tabloid talk show. In the mid-1990s, Winfrey began to host shows on broader topics such as heart disease, geopolitics, spirituality, and meditation. She interviewed celebrities on social issues they were directly involved with, such as cancer, charity work, or substance abuse, and hosted televised giveaways. The later years of the show faced accusations that Winfrey was promoting junk science. This has manifested as criticisms of Winfrey for promoting particular guests whose medical commentaries (both on her show and in the wider media) frequently lack supporting science. Common targets of this criticism include Dr. Oz's promotion of various "miracle pills" (especially those aimed at weight loss), Dr. Phil, Jenny McCarthy's unfounded assertions about vaccines, and Suzanne Somers's promotion of bioidenticals. Multiple publications have called on Oprah to denounce medical statements made by her former proteges long after her show ended. For example, there were calls for her to denounce Dr. Oz in 2020 reaction to his comments about coronavirus and his promotion of a poorly vetted drug as a cure.

In addition to her talk show, Winfrey also produced and co-starred in the drama miniseries ''The Women of Brewster Place'' (1989) and its short-lived spin-off, ''Brewster Place''. As well as hosting and appearing on television shows, Winfrey co-founded the women's cable television network Oxygen which was the initial network for her ''Oprah After the Show'' program from 2002 to 2006 before moving to Oprah.com when Winfrey sold her stake in the network. She is also the president of Harpo Productions (''Oprah'' spelled backwards), a film and TV production company behind ''The Oprah Winfrey Show'', '' Dr. Phil'', ''Rachael Ray'', '' The Dr. Oz Show'' and many others. She also moderated three '' ABC Afterschool Special''s from 1992 to 1994.

On January 15, 2008, Winfrey and Discovery Communications announced plans to change Discovery Health Channel into a new channel called '' OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network''. It was scheduled to launch in 2009 but was delayed, and actually launched on January 1, 2011.

The series finale of ''The Oprah Winfrey Show'' aired on May 25, 2011.

In January 2017, CBS announced that Winfrey would join '' 60 Minutes'' as a special contributor on the Sunday evening news magazine program starting in September 2017. The National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2018 opened a special exhibit on Winfrey's cultural influence through television. Winfrey left ''60 Minutes'' by the end of 2018.

In June 2018, Apple announced a multi-year content partnership with Winfrey, in which it was agreed that Winfrey would create new original programs exclusively for Apple's streaming service, Apple TV+. The first show under the deal, ''Oprah's Book Club'', premiered on November 1, 2019. ''Oprah's Book Club'' is based on the segment of the same name from ''The Oprah Winfrey Show''. The second show under the deal, ''Oprah Talks COVID-19'', debuted on March 21, 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic. A third show, ''The Oprah Conversation'' debuted on July 30, 2020, with Winfrey " ontinuingto explore impactful and relevant topics with fascinating thought leaders from all over the world".

Celebrity interviews

In 1993, Winfrey hosted a rare prime-time interview with Michael Jackson, which became the fourth most-watched event in American television history as well as the most watched interview ever, with an audience of 36.5 million. On December 1, 2005, Winfrey appeared on the '' Late Show with David Letterman'' for the first time in 16 years, to promote the new Broadway musical, ''The Color Purple'','' Time (magazine)
/ref> which she produced. The episode was hailed by some as the "television event of the decade" and helped Letterman attract his largest audience in more than 11 years: 13.45 million viewers. Although a much-rumored feud was said to have been the cause of the rift, both Winfrey and Letterman balked at such talk. "I want you to know, it's really over, whatever you thought was happening," said Winfrey. On September 10, 2007, Letterman made his first appearance on ''The Oprah Winfrey Show'', as its season premiere was filmed in New York City.

In 2006, rappers Ludacris, 50 Cent, and Ice Cube criticized Winfrey for what they perceived as an anti- hip hop bias. In an interview with '' GQ'' magazine, Ludacris said that Winfrey gave him a "hard time" about his lyrics, and edited comments he made during an appearance on her show with the cast of the film ''Crash''. He also said that he wasn't initially invited on the show with the rest of the cast. Winfrey responded by saying that she is opposed to rap lyrics that "marginalize women," but enjoys some artists, including Kanye West, who appeared on her show. She said she spoke with Ludacris backstage after his appearance to explain her position and said she understood that his music was for entertainment purposes, but that some of his listeners might take it literally. In September 2008, Winfrey received criticism after Matt Drudge of the ''Drudge Report'' reported that Winfrey refused to have Sarah Palin on her show, allegedly because of Winfrey's support for Barack Obama. Winfrey denied the report, maintaining that there never was a discussion regarding Palin's appearing on her show. She said that after she made public her support for Obama, she decided that she would not let her show be used as a platform for any of the candidates. Although Obama appeared twice on her show, those appearances were prior to his declaration as a presidential candidate. Winfrey added that Palin would make a fantastic guest and that she would love to have her on the show after the election, which she did on November 18, 2009.

In 2009, Winfrey was criticized for allowing actress Suzanne Somers to appear on her show to discuss hormone treatments that are not accepted by mainstream medicine. Critics have also suggested that Winfrey is not tough enough when questioning celebrity guests or politicians whom she appears to like. Lisa de Moraes, a media columnist for ''The Washington Post'', stated: "Oprah doesn't do follow-up questions unless you're an author who's embarrassed her by fabricating portions of a supposed memoir she's plugged for her book club."

In 2021, she conducted an interview with Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, and her husband Prince Harry, which was broadcast globally and received international media attention.

Other media

Film

Winfrey co-starred in Steven Spielberg's ''The Color Purple'' (1985), as distraught housewife Sofia. She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance. The Alice Walker novel later became a Broadway musical which opened in late 2005, with Winfrey credited as a producer. In October 1998, Winfrey produced and starred in the film '' Beloved'', based on Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize–winning novel of the same name. To prepare for her role as Sethe, the protagonist and former slave, Winfrey experienced a 24-hour simulation of the experience of slavery, which included being tied up and blindfolded and left alone in the woods. Despite major advertising, including two episodes of her talk show dedicated solely to the film, and moderate to good critical reviews, ''Beloved'' opened to poor box-office results, losing approximately $30 million. While promoting the movie, co-star Thandie Newton described Winfrey as "a very strong technical actress and it's because she's so smart. She's acute. She's got a mind like a razor blade." Harpo Productions released a film adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston's 1937 novel ''Their Eyes Were Watching God'' in 2005. The made-for-television film was based upon a teleplay by Suzan-Lori Parks and starred Halle Berry in the lead female role.

In late 2008, Winfrey's company Harpo Films signed an exclusive output pact to develop and produce scripted series, documentaries, and movies exclusively for HBO.

Oprah voiced Gussie the goose in '' Charlotte's Web'' (2006) and voiced Judge Bumbleton in ''Bee Movie'' (2007), co-starring the voices of Jerry Seinfeld and Renée Zellweger. In 2009, Winfrey provided the voice for the character of Eudora, the mother of Princess Tiana, in Disney's ''The Princess and the Frog'' and in 2010, narrated the US version of the BBC
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