1) Oprah Winfrey's first name was supposed to be Orpah, after Ruth's sister-in-law in the Bible, but it was misspelled Oprah on her birth certificate. The name stuck.
2) Embarrassed by her butterfly-rimmed eyeglasses as a teen, Oprah Winfrey asked her mother to replace them. When she wouldn't, Oprah Winfrey broke them and called the cops. "The story was that someone broke in, hit me on the head and knocked off my glasses," she told the Washington Post. "I lay down and faked amnesia."
3) Barbara Walters shaped the budding Oprah Winfrey's interviewing style. "For the first six months I was on the air, I imitated her like crazy," Winfrey told the Los Angeles Times in 1987.
4) Oprah Winfrey is the first African-American celebrity to land on the cover of Vogue, in the October 1998 issue. She loses 20 lbs. for the photo shoot. "If you want to be on the cover of Vogue and [editor-in-chief] Anna Wintour says you have to be down to 150 lbs. – that's what you gotta do," Winfrey tells the BBC.
5) Extremely spiritual, Oprah Winfrey prays and meditates daily. "My prayer to God every morning is that the power that is in the universe should use my life as a vessel for its work," she told Redbook in August 1996. "Prayer is the central thing for me."
