Oprah Winfrey

Oprah Gail Winfrey (born Orpah Gail Winfrey; January 29, 1954) is an American media proprietor, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist.^[1] She is best known for her talk show The Oprah Winfrey Show, which was the highest-rated television program of its kind in history and was nationally syndicated from 1986 to 2011 in Chicago, Illinois.^[5] Dubbed the "Queen of All Media",^[6] she has been ranked the richest African-American,^[7] the greatest black philanthropist in American history,^[8][9] and is currently North America's first and only multi-billionaire black person.^[10] Several assessments rank her as the most influential woman in the world.^[11][12] In 2013, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama^[13] and honorary doctorate degrees from Duke and Harvard.^[14][15]


Winfrey was born into poverty in rural Mississippi to a teenage single mother and later raised in an inner-city Milwaukee neighborhood. She has stated that she was molested during her childhood and early teens and became pregnant at 14; her son died in infancy.^[16] Sent to live with the man she calls her father, a barber in Tennessee, Winfrey landed a job in radio while still in high school and began co-anchoring the local evening news at the age of 19. Her emotional ad-lib delivery eventually got her transferred to the daytime talk show arena, and after boosting a third-rated local Chicago talk show to first place,^[17] she launched her own production company and became internationally syndicated.
Credited with creating a more intimate confessional form of media communication,^[18] she is thought to have popularized and revolutionized^[18][19] the tabloid talk show genre pioneered by Phil Donahue,^[18] which a Yale study says broke 20th century taboos and allowed LGBT people to enter the mainstream.^[20][21] By the mid-1990s, she had reinvented her show with a focus on literature, self-improvement, and spirituality. Though criticized for unleashing a confession culture, promoting controversial self-help ideas,^[22] and an emotion-centered approach,^[23] she is often praised for overcoming adversity to become a benefactor to others.^[24] From 2006 to 2008, her endorsement of Obama, by one estimate, delivered over a million votes in the close 2008 Democratic primary race.^[25]