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]
Sydney, Australia
London, Ontario, Kanada
