Winfrey was born into poverty in rural Mississippi to a young single mom and subsequently grew in the inner-city Milwaukee community. She has said that she was harassed during her childhood and early adolescents and turned into pregnant in 14; her boy died at infancy. Sent to go with this person she calls her dad, Vernon Winfrey, the hairdresser in Tennessee, she landed the business at radio while still in highschool and started co-anchoring the local evening news at the age of 19. Her emotional ad-lib delivery finally had her transferred to the daytime talk entertainment environment, and after promoting the third-rated local citv conversation show to first home, she established her own production company and became internationally syndicated.
Oprah Winfrey, (born January 29, 1954, Kosciusko, Mississippi, U.S.), American television personality, actress, and entrepreneur whose syndicated daily talk show was among the most popular of the genre. She became one of the richest and most influential women in the United States. Winfrey moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, at age six to live with her mother. In her early teens she was sent to Nashville to live with her father, who proved to be a positive influence in her life. At age 19 Winfrey became a news anchor for the local CBS television station. Following her graduation from Tennessee State University in 1976, she was made a reporter and coanchor for the ABC news affiliate in Baltimore, Maryland. She found herself constrained by the objectivity required of news reporting, and in 1977 she became cohost of the Baltimore morning show People Are Talking.
Winfrey excelled in the casual and personal talk-show format, and in 1984 she moved to Chicago to host the faltering talk show AM Chicago. Winfrey’s honest and engaging personality quickly turned the program into a success, and in 1985 it was renamed The Oprah Winfrey Show. Syndicated nationally in 1986, the program became the highest-rated television talk show in the United States and earned several Emmy Awards. In 1985 Winfrey appeared in Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Alice Walker’s 1982 novel The Color Purple. Her critically acclaimed performance led to other roles, including a performance in the television miniseries The Women of Brewster Place (1989). Winfrey formed her own television production company, Harpo Productions, Inc., in 1986, and a film production company, Harpo Films, in 1990. The companies began buying film rights to literary works, including Connie May Fowler’s Before Women Had Wings, which appeared in 1997 with Winfrey as both star and producer, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which appeared in 1998, also with Winfrey in a starring role. Winfrey later lent her voice to several animated films, including Charlotte’s Web (2006) and The Princess and the Frog (2009), and appeared in Lee Daniels’ The Butler (2013). Selma (2014), a film about Martin Luther King, Jr., that Winfrey produced and also appeared in, was nominated for an Academy Award for best picture. She subsequently starred in the HBO TV movie The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2017), portraying the daughter of a woman whose cancerous cells were, unbeknownst to her and her family, used in research that led to numerous scientific advances. Winfrey then appeared as Mrs. Which in the 2018 film adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s acclaimed 1962 sci-fi novel, A Wrinkle in Time.
