Oprah Winfrey
Oprah Winfrey Photos | Oprah Winfrey Biography
Birth Name: Oprah Gail Winfrey
Also Known As: Oprah, O, Deepak Oprah (a sendup of Deepak Chopra, a self-help guru)
Birth Date: January 29, 1954
Birth Place: Kosciusko, Mississippi, USA
Height: 5′ 6½”
Sex: Female
Nationality: American
Profession: Producer, Actress, Soundtrack, Taklshow host, Author
Education: East Nashville High School in Nashville, Tennessee (graduated in 1971)
Tennessee State University (graduated with a degree in Speech and Performing Arts)
Relationship: Stedman Graham (author, educator; lived together since 1986; ended the relationship in June 2006)
Father: Vernon Winfrey (barber, businessman, city-council member; never married to Oprah’s mother)
Mother: Vernita Lee
Step Mother: Zelma Winfrey (died 1996)
Sons: (d. 1970 at age two weeks, when Oprah was 14)
Claim to fame: Host of The Oprah Winfrey Show
Oprah Winfrey Short Biography
Oprah Gail Winfrey (born January 29, 1954) is an American television host, producer, and philanthropist, best known for her self-titled, multi-award winning talk show, which has become the highest-rated program of its kind in history. She has been ranked the richest African American of the 20th century and beyond, the greatest black philanthropist in American history, and was once the world’s only black billionaire. She is also, according to some assessments, the most influential woman in the world.
Winfrey was born into poverty in rural Mississippi to a teenage single mother and later raised in an inner-city Milwaukee neighborhood. She experienced considerable hardship during her childhood, including being raped at the age of nine and becoming pregnant at 14; her son died in infancy. 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, she launched her own production company and became internationally syndicated.
Credited with creating a more intimate confessional form of media communication, she is thought to have popularized and revolutionized the tabloid talk show genre pioneered by Phil Donahue, which a Yale study claims broke 20th century taboos and allowed LGBT people to enter the mainstream. By the mid 1990s she had reinvented her show with a focus on literature, self-improvement, and spirituality. Though criticized for unleashing confession culture and promoting controversial self-help fads, she is generally admired for overcoming adversity to become a benefactor to others. In 2006 she became an early supporter of Barack Obama and one analysis estimates she delivered over a million votes in the close 2008 Democratic primary race, an achievement for which the governor of Illinois considered offering her a seat in the U.S. senate.
Oprah Winfrey Photo Gallery
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