Oprah: Her Incredible Life

Oprah at 70! ‘The real reason I was able to own that show? Nobody expected it to become the enormous success it did’—OPRAH WINFREY OPRAH: JUST LIKE US—AND LIKE NO ONE EVER BEFORE From a Childhood in Poverty to Media Billionaire: Oprah Winfrey’s Path to Becoming America’s Best TV Friend PLUS Oprah & Stedman: Their Life Now THE COLOR PURPLE The Movie Musical!…

New York City, 1986. Home sick from high school, on my living room couch, I tuned into WABC-7 and couldn’t believe what I saw. At 10 a.m. a heavy, brown-skinned woman with wonderful floppy, straight-permed hair and a purple shoulder-padded outfit. What’s her name? It’s different. “They let her host her own talk show?” I asked aloud to no one in the room. Yes, they did. In the mid-’80s, Oprah Winfrey was a welcome sight to my eyes. Over the next 25 years of The Oprah Winfrey Show she become an on-air girlfriend, chatting about losing weight, finding true love or just feeling good when those goals were taking too long. She was flawed, and eager to self-improve. She let her mascara run when a subject brought her to tears.…

Elevating the Conversation After three years in the talk trenches, in 1989 Winfrey decided to rise above the muck. An episode in which a man surprised his wife with news that his mistress was pregnant had been her undoing. “Never again will I do that to somebody,” she vowed. Instead, “I was making the intentional effort to be a good force in people’s lives.” Initially the do-good mandate caused viewership to fall off and affiliates to beg her: “Why can’t you have ‘Trash Fridays?’” she recalled in 2019. But it was a risk worth taking: The Oprah Winfrey Show remains the highest-rated talk show in daytime history. ‘THIS IS A REVOLUTION’—TONI MORRISON, ON OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB, 1997 Reading Beyond Boundaries “If you don’t like this book, then I don’t have…

OPRAH WINFREY THOUGHT she had landed on an alien planet. It was 1960, and 6-year-old Oprah, who to that point had been raised by her grandmother in rural Kosciusko, Miss., had just arrived in urban Milwaukee where she would now live with her mother, Vernita Lee, who worked as a maid cleaning houses. The new neighborhood was noisy and crowded; the boardinghouse where her mother lived was unwelcoming and claustrophobic. This was a startling change from the quiet life she had known on her grandma Hattie Mae’s three-acre hog farm. Oprah had loved talking to the pigs and chickens and sharing the warmth of her maternal grandmother’s bed. On her first night in Milwaukee, Winfrey would recall years later, she was made to sleep on the porch by the boarding-house…

HER BIG CAREER BREAK CAME AT AGE 19, while still a student at Tennessee State University, studying to become a teacher and reading the news on college radio. Chris Clark, a lead anchor for the CBS-TV affiliate in Nashville heard her and reached out about a job in television. She turned him down. “I said, ‘No, sir … my father says I have to finish school, and school is just too important,’” Winfrey told 2023 graduates during her commencement speech at her alma mater. She did, however, consult a professor, who set her straight. “He said, ‘This is why you get an education for, fool,’” she joked to the students. “‘So that CBS Channel 5 will call you! You and your father ought to know that…. I’ll tell him myself.’…

Before her show went national, Oprah Winfrey spoke to People for her first profile in the magazine. At the time, the buzz around her was about her double-threat talent—hosting daytime TV and acting in a serious film sure to be in awards contention—but also, notably, about her appearance. There just hadn’t been anyone before who had made that kind of all-media splash and who might also share a jeans size with the average American woman. Reflecting an openness that would soon become a feature of her show’s appeal, Winfrey didn’t shy away from the discussion; she revealed her weight, and it was included in People’s story. In that moment both local papers and late-night talk show hosts felt entitled to comment on Winfrey’s size. On The Tonight Show, comedian Joan…