Oprah Gail Winfrey (born January 29, 1954) is an American television presenter, media mogul and philanthropist. Her internationally-syndicated talk show, The Oprah Winfrey Show, has earned her multiple Emmy Awards and is the highest-rated talk show in the history of television.[2] She is also an influential book critic, an Academy Award nominated actress, and a magazine publisher. She has been ranked the richest African American of the 20th century,[3] the most philanthropic African American of all time,[4] and was once the world's only black billionaire.[5][6][7][8][9] She is also, according to some assessments, the most influential woman in the world.[10][11][12]
Born in rural Mississippi to a poor teenage single mother and later raised in an inner city Milwaukee neighborhood, Winfrey was raped at age 9 and at 14-years-old gave birth to a son, who died in infancy.[13] 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.[14] 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,[6] she launched her own production company and became internationally syndicated.
Credited with creating a more intimate confessional form of media communication,[15] she is thought to have popularized and revolutionized[16][17][15][18] the tabloid talk show genre pioneered by Phil Donahue,[15] which a Yale study claimed broke 20th century taboos and allowed LGBT people to enter the mainstream.[19] By the mid 1990s she had reinvented her show with a focus on literature, self-improvement, and spirituality. Though criticized for unleashing confession culture[18] and promoting controversial self-help fads, she is generally admired for overcoming adversity to become a benefactor to others.[20] In 2006 she became an early supporter of Barack...