Oprah Winfrey was born in the rural town of Kosciusko, Mississippi on January 29, 1954 as an only child to unmarried parents who soon separated, leaving her with her grandmother. At age 6, she went to live with her mother, and, in her teens, she went to live with her father. While there, Winfrey become an honor student. She even landed a job at a radio station, where she realized she wanted to talk for a living.
She went on to major in speech communications and performing arts at Tennessee State University with a scholarship while maintaining a job at WVOL, a local Black radio station. She became a news anchor for different programs and co-hosted morning shows before landing into her own morning show called “AM Chicago”. She turned the show into a success with her personality, and shortly after it was renamed into “The Oprah Winfrey Show”. It ran for 25 years, growing in popularity with over 10 million viewers and became the highest-rated television talk show in the United States. She gained ownership of the show from ABC, making her the first woman to own and produce her own talk show.
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After her show ended in 2011, she moved on to Oprah’s Next Chapter, a weekly prime-time interview program on the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) that debuted in January 2012, and in 2018 she began creating content for Apple TV+. She went on to release miniseries and movies in which she appeared through her production company, Harpo Productions, and continued “Oprah’s Book Club” which was launched in her talk show as a space to show new authors and books along with “Oprah’s Favorite Things,” which discussed a list of holiday gifts and was featured in Amazon in 2017. She interviewed various celebrities over the years such as Michael Jackson and Michelle Obama, and even released her own books.
She also started a campaign focused on establishing a database of convicted child abusers, even testifying before a U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on behalf of a National Child Protection Act. This paid off, and, in 1993, President Clinton signed the “Oprah Bill” into law, establishing the national database. She’s a partner in Oxygen Media, Inc., a cable channel and interactive network specifically for women, and in 2000, Oprah’s Angel Network introduced the “Use Your Life Award”, which gave $100,000 to those using their own lives to improve those of others.
Oprah then released two magazines, O, The Oprah Magazine, and O at Home (which shut down in 2008), with the first being the most successful start-up in the history of the industry. O, The Oprah Magazine ceased printing in 2020 and was rebranded in 2021 as O Quarterly (Printed) and Oprah Daily (Digital). In 2003, Forbes revealed that Oprah was the first African American woman billionaire. In 2011, she received an award for all her philanthropic efforts from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with a special Oscar statuette named the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. In 2013, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which is the nation’s highest civilian honor.
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