The success of The Oprah Winfrey Show lies in the simple fact that Oprah never asks her guests or her audience to go where she would not go herself.  Her yo-yoing weight was a regular topic of discussion, and when she tearfully recounted the poverty, racism and sexual abuse she had suffered as a child, the nation wept with her. She never hesitated to reveal the lurid details of her own life, from teenage pregnancy to grown-up drug addiction. And the more she confessed, the more audiences loved her. She exposed the nation to a stream of alcoholics, teen gangsters, abandoned children - all of whom told their stories to her - and thus rose to become the reigning diva of daytime TV.  

Oprah was born in Kosciusko, Mississippi, on January 29, 1954.  Her mother, a housemaid called Vernita Lee, was only fourteen years old at the time.  Oprah - a mistaken rendering of the biblical Orpah - spent her childhood years going back and forth between her grandmother in the South and her mother in Milwaukee. Her mother wasn't a very responsible woman.  In her care Oprah grew up both wild and fearful, a state undoubtedly brought on by the fact that she was sexually abused by several male relatives. Oprah followed in her mother's footsteps when she gave birth to an illegitimate child. The child died shortly after birth. This is when her father, Vernon, a barber in Nashville, decided to step in.  She went to live with him and his loving discipline brought about a complete change in the adolescent. She would soon blossom into a brilliant student and public speaker. While still in high school, she had her first experiences as a newscaster at radio station WVOL. She enrolled in Tennessee State University in 1972, where she excelled at rhetoric and drama.

1976 found her in Baltimore, where she had landed a job as a newscaster at a small television station.  Oprah would soon find her true calling in the morning talk show, People Are Talking. In 1984 she was recruited by the much larger Chicago station, WLS-TV. Within two years, her time slot was pitted against that of talk-show king Phil Donahue. In her first Chicago she baffled the audience by confessing how fat and frightened she felt. Her total candor stood in total contrast to Donahue's middle-aged waffling and when letters and telephone calls of support started flooding in, WLS-TV knew they had a hit show on their hands. Oprah had found her niche.

The rest is history. The Oprah Winfrey Show beat Donahue in the Nielsen ratings, and she was soon syndicated in more than a hundred cities. In 1985 producer Steven Spielberg cast her as Sofia in his film version of Alice Walker's novel The Color Purple, a role for which Oprah would earn an Academy Award nomination. Four years later, she starred in the television miniseries The Women of Brewster Place.  She founded the twenty-million-dollar-grossing Harpo Productions (Harpo is Oprah spelled backwards) and made American entertainment history by becoming only the third woman - after Mary Pickford and Lucille Ball - to own her own production company.

In 1994, Oprah was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame. 1994 was also the year when the bill she herself had proposed to Congress was signed by President Bill Clinton.  It provided for the creation of a national database of convicted child abusers.  In 1996, following the success of Make the Connection, a fitness bible written by Oprah with her personal trainer, she started a monthly book club, complete with author appearances and literary analysis.

In 1997 she renewed her commitment to The Oprah Winfrey Show through the end of the decade. Her deal with King World Productions was the final step in making Winfrey America's first black billionaire.

In 2000 she started two new ventures as the co-founder of Oxygen Media, a cable and Internet company and O, The Oprah Magazine.

Today she is the richest woman in America, one of the most powerful people in modern entertainment and, parenthetically, extremely influential.

 

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