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Oprah Winfrey (born January 29, 1954) is an American talk show host and an Academy Award nominated actress. She is one of the most successful entrepreneurs and television personalities in the world. She is currently involved in many business ventures, but is most identified with her massively popular and eponymous talk show. She is currently ranked as the most powerful celebrity by Forbes magazine as well as the ninth most powerful woman in the world. She is the first African-American woman to become a billionaire.
Winfrey was born Orpah Winfrey in Kosciusko, Mississippi to a desperately poor Baptist family. The name on Winfrey's birth certificate is Orpah, after the Moabite woman in the Old Testament Book of Ruth, but her family and neighbours would often transpose the R and the P when pronouncing and writing her name as a result, Oprah eventually became her accepted name.
Her mother, Vernita Lee, was a housemaid, and her father, Vernon Winfrey, was a soldier. After Winfrey was born, her mother travelled north for better job opportunities, and Winfrey spent her first six years living with her grandmother. Winfrey's grandmother taught her to read and took her to the local church, where she was nicknamed " The Preacher" for her ability to recite Bible verses.
At age six, Winfrey moved in with her mother, who was less supportive and encouraging than her grandmother. Her mother lived in dire poverty. Her mother made hessian overalls from potato sacks for Oprah to wear, which led other children to give her the nickname " Sack Girl" . She had few toys one was a doll made from a corncob.
Her mother sent her to live in better conditions with her father, Vernon, in Nashville, Tennessee. Vernon was strict but encouraging, and made her education a priority. Winfrey became an honors student and received a full scholarship to Tennessee State University, a historically Black institution, where she studied speech and performing arts. At age 18, Winfrey won the Miss Black Tennessee beauty pageant.
Winfrey's grandmother has said that ever since Oprah could talk, she was " on stage" . In her youth she played games interviewing her corncob doll and the crows on the fence of her family's property. But her true media career began at age seventeen, working at her high school radio show.
Working in local media, she was both the youngest news anchor and the first black female news anchor at Nashville's WTVF-TV. She moved to Baltimore's WJZ-TV in 1976 to co-anchor the six o'clock news. 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. In 1983, Winfrey relocated to Chicago, Illinois to host WLS-TV's low-rated half-hour morning talk show, AM Chicago. Her first episode aired on January 2, 1984. With Winfrey as the host, the show was so successful that it was renamed The Oprah Winfrey Show, expanded to a full hour, and broadcast nationally beginning September 8, 1986. Originally, the show followed traditional talk show formats. By the mid-1990s the shows adopted a more serious format, addressing issues that Winfrey thought were of direct importance and of crucial consequence to women. Winfrey began to do a lot of charity work, and her show featured people suffering from poverty or the victims of unfortunate accidents.
The Oprah Winfrey Show is extremely successful and popular, seen by 21 million viewers a week in 150 countries. She often interviews celebrities (sometimes purely about upcoming movies/albums/television roles, but usually about current-affairs issues that involve the celebrity in some way, such as cancer, charity work, or substance abuse), although more often she focuses on ordinary people that have done extraordinary things or been involved in important current issues. Oprah frequently features the plight of others around the world in her show, and uses the show to promote charitable causes. Oprah's trademark in recent years has been her " Wildest Dreams" tour, which fulfills the dreams of many deserving people, be it a new house, an encounter with a favourite performer, or a guest role on a popular TV show, who have been reported to her producers by loving friends and family. As well as the hour-long regular show, she tapes informal discussions or Q& A sessions with celebrity guests after the show, which are broadcast as Oprah After The Show on her Oxygen network.
During a lawsuit against Winfrey, she hired Dr. Phil McGraw's company Courtroom Sciences, Inc. to help her analyze and read the jury. Dr. Phil made such an impression on Winfrey that she invited him to appear on her show. He accepted the invitation and was a resounding success. McGraw appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show for several years before launching his own show, Dr. Phil, in 2004, which is produced by Winfrey's production company, Harpo Productions.
Perhaps Oprah's most famous recent show was the first episode of the nineteenth season of The Oprah Winfrey Show in the fall of 2004. During the show each member of the audience received a new Pontiac G6 Sedan the 276 cars were donated by Pontiac as part of a publicity stunt. Winfrey recently made a deal to extend her show until the 2010 – 2011 season, by which time it will have been on the air for twenty-five years. She plans to host 140 episodes per season, until her final season, when it will return to its current number, 130.
The 2004 Nobel Peace Prize Concert was hosted by Oprah and Tom Cruise. There were musical performances by Patti Labelle, Andrea Bocelli, Joss Stone, Chris Botti, Diana Krall, Tony Bennett and others. The concert was broadcasted in the United States on Dec. 23, 2004 by E!. An unofficial Oprah fanclub, also organized a petition drive in 2005, to nominate Oprah for the Nobel Peace Prize.
As well as hosting and appearing on television shows, Winfrey co-founded the women's cable television network Oxygen. She is also the president of Harpo Productions (Oprah spelled backwards). In 1985, Winfrey co-starred in Steven Spielberg's epic adaptation of Alice Walker's award-winning novel The Color Purple. She earned immediate acclaim as Sofia, the distraught housewife. The following year Winfrey was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, but she lost to Anjelica Huston. Many believe this was due in part to the Academy's " Anti-Spielberg" bias, thinking the film would have been better directed by an African-American. The Color Purple has now been made into a Broadway musical and opened late 2005, with Oprah credited as a producer.
In October 1998, Oprah produced and starred in the film Beloved, based upon Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize winning novel of the same name. To prepare for her role as Sethe, the protagonist and former slave, Oprah experienced a 24-hour simulation of the experience of slavery, which included being tied up and blindfolded and left alone in the woods. Critics said this would not even come close to the experience. In the run-up to filming, and in an attempt to break the only field she hadn't conquered -- film stardom. However, despite major advertising, including two episodes of her talk show dedicated solely to the film, it opened to sour critical reviews and poor box-office results, losing approximately $30 million.
In 2005, Harpo Productions released another film adaptation of a famous American novel, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). The made-for-television film Their Eyes Were Watching God was based upon a teleplay by Suzan-Lori Parks, and starred Halle Berry in the lead female role.
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