Oprah Gail Winfrey
Oprah Gail Winfrey (born January 29, 1954) is an American television host, actress, producer, and philanthropist, best known for her self-titled, multi-award winning talk show, which has become the highest-rated program of its kind in history.
She has been ranked the richest African American of the 20th century and beyond,[he greatest black philanthropist in American history, and was once the world's only black billionaire. She is also, according to some assessments, the most influential woman in the world.[
Winfrey was born into poverty in rural Mississippi to a teenage single mother and later raised in an inner-city Milwaukee neighborhood. She experienced considerable hardship during her childhood, including being raped at the age of nine and becoming pregnant at 14; her son died in infancy. 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. 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 she launched her own production company and became internationally syndicated. Credited with creating a more intimate confessional form of media communication, she is thought to have popularized and revolutionized the tabloid talk show genre pioneered by Phil Donahue, which a Yale study claims broke 20th century taboos and allowed LGBT people to enter the mainstream.
By the mid 1990s she had reinvented her show with a focus on literature,
self-improvement, and spirituality. Though criticized for unleashing confession
culture and promoting controversial self-help fads, she is generally admired
for overcoming adversity to become a benefactor to others. In 2006 she
became an early supporter of Barack Obama and one analysis estimates she
delivered over a million votes in the close 2008 Democratic primary race,[26]
an achievement for which the governor of Illinois considered offering
her a seat in the U.S. senate.
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