Pop Culture Universe: Icons, Idols, Ideas
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Oprah Winfrey
One of America's best loved and most influential personalities, Oprah Winfrey has had a
tremendous effect on the nation's culture, beginning with her role as host of television's The Oprah
Winfrey Show. Her trademark as a talk show host, and the prime reason for her popularity, is her
ability to be herself—to act as though the audience is just a big group of her friends. Her huge
popularity on that show supplied Winfrey with new opportunities to act on television and film.
Oprah Gail Winfrey was born on January 29, 1954, on a farm in Kosciusko, Mississippi. Her name
was supposed to be "Orpah," after a biblical character, but the midwife misspelled the name on the
birth certificate. Her parents were not married and broke up soon after their daughter was born.
Winfrey's strict maternal grandmother provided plenty of discipline as she grew up on an isolated
farm, where her main entertainment was playing with corncob dolls and the farm's chickens and cows. Her grandmother
taught her to read by the time she was two and a half, but even earlier she had begun addressing the congregation of
their church on simple religious topics. Offended by the thought of going to kindergarten, Winfrey wrote a note to her
teacher saying that she should be promoted to the first grade, which the dumbfounded teacher did. Winfrey then skipped
second grade altogether.
When she was six, Winfrey joined her mother in an inner city neighborhood of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She missed all the
animals on the farm but soon found a new hobby to distract her—reciting poetry at African American social functions. She
became something of a sensation locally and earned the nickname "the little speaker." When she visited her father in
Nashville when she was 12, Winfrey won $500 for a speech she gave at his church. That very night, she made up her
mind that she wanted to "be paid to talk."
When she returned to Milwaukee, though, Winfrey's life became troubled. Her mother was too busy trying to make money
to pay the bills to spend any time with her teenage daughter. Meanwhile, some of the family's trusted men resumed the
sexual abuse of Winfrey that they had started when she was nine. Finally, Winfrey began to lash out in anger at the world
by lying to her mother, running away from home, and stealing. Her desperate mother, unaware of the nightmare her
daughter was going through, decided to send the girl to live with her father.
Winfrey later said of her father, a barber and a local official in Nashville, that he saved her life. Like her grandmother,
Winfrey's father was a strict parent who believed in strong discipline for children. He also gave his daughter books, talked
with her long into the night, and provided much needed guidance in her life. Her education came before any other
concerns, and Winfrey's father would not let his daughter have dinner until she had added five new words to her
vocabulary that day. He also assigned a weekly book report.
Far from rebelling against that new discipline in her life, Winfrey began to blossom academically. Not only did her grades
go up, but she also was chosen as leader of her high school's student council, participated in the drama club, and won an
Elks Club oratory contest when she was 16. The contest's prize was a full scholarship to Tennessee State University.
Before she went off to college, Winfrey got a job reading newscasts every half-hour at WVOL, the local radio station,
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every day after school.
As a freshman at Tennessee State, Winfrey won the Miss Black Nashville and Miss Black Tennessee competitions and in
1971, competed in the Miss Black America Pageant. Meanwhile, the local CBS television affiliate twice offered her a job,
but she kept refusing. Finally, after prompting from a teacher, Winfrey took the job and, as a college junior, became
Nashville's first African American woman to coanchor the evening news.
Winfrey graduated in 1976 with a bachelor's degree in speech and drama and immediately accepted an offer to work as
reporter and coanchor for an ABC affiliate in Baltimore, Maryland. She had trouble interviewing people at scenes of
disasters or personal tragedies, however, and often found herself in tears along with the victims. The station manager did
not approve and threatened to fire Winfrey if she could not overcome her compassion with journalistic objectivity. Soon
afterward, an inept beauty salon treatment suggested by the assistant news director left Winfrey bald, so she had to cover
her head with a scarf during the newscasts. Her self-confidence in tatters, Winfrey turned to food to dull her emotional
distress.
Although Winfrey's weight climbed as she continued to use food to comfort herself, her career began to take off. In 1977,
the ABC affiliate transferred her to doing 7:25 A.M. local news updates during Good Morning, America. Next came her
move to the morning talk show Baltimore Is Talking as cohost. Winfrey later told Ms. magazine that after doing her first
performance on that show, she decided: "This is what I was born to do. This is like breathing." She stayed with the show
as cohost for seven years until a general manager of an ABC affiliate in Chicago saw her on an audition tape and hired
both Winfrey and her producer to rescue an ailing talk show. At that time, her ratings in Baltimore were even higher than
talk show king Phil Donahue's.
Winfrey moved to Chicago in 1984 and took on the task of overhauling the tepid talk show A.M. Chicago, which had
steadily lost viewers to Donahue for 16 straight seasons. Modeling her style on Barbara Walters, within one month,
Winfrey had brought the show to a neck-and-neck race with Donahue, and within three months, A.M. Chicago was edging
its rival out. In September 1985, the show was expanded to an hour and retitled The Oprah Winfrey Show.
Even after Donahue abandoned the arena by moving back to New York, Winfrey continued to make improvements in her
show and to attract new viewers. One of her first changes was to discard the cue cards and prepared script she was
made to use during interviews. That change to improvisation was a crucial factor in the emergence of Winfrey as the
spontaneous, enthusiastic, and personable woman she really is. In addition, she was now free to ask the sometimes
shocking questions that people wanted to ask but were usually afraid to. She elicited genuine emotions and revelations
from people, and she often held an interviewee's hand or burst into tears herself. In the mid-1980s, Winfrey revealed
during a show about incest victims that she herself had been sexually abused as a girl. Many viewers also identified with
Winfrey's battle to lose weight and to change her relationship with food.
In 1985, producer and composer Quincy Jones decided that Winfrey would be perfect for a part in the Steven Spielbergdirected film The Color Purple, based on a best-selling novel by Alice Walker. Although she had only acted once, Winfrey
played the character of Sofia. Chicago film critic Gene Siskel called Winfrey's debut "shockingly good," and she earned
nominations for both Golden Globe and Oscar awards for her work. Her next film role came in 1986, when she was cast
in the movie version of Richard Wright's novel Native Son, but the reviews for that performance were less gratifying. She
also appeared in the hit comedy film Throw Momma from the Train in 1988 and Listen Up: The Lives of Quincy Jones
(1992).
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Meanwhile, Winfrey's television show in Chicago had become even more popular. It went into syndication in 1986 in a
record-setting 138 cities and earned an unheard of $150 million in the 1988-1989 season. She signed a five-year contract
with the show's producer, King World, in 1986—the same year she formed her own production company, Harpo
Incorporated. Through Harpo Inc., Winfrey has produced the made-for-television movies The Women of Brewster Place
(1989) and There Are No Children Here (1993), in which she also acted, as well as the television series Brewster Place
(1990). She has also hosted numerous interview specials. Winfrey won Emmy Awards for best daytime talk show host in
1987, 1991, 1992, 1994, and 1995.
In 1998, Winfrey seemed at the pinnacle of success. The Oprah Winfrey Show reached 33 million viewers per week,
making the show approximately $300 million per year; her on-air book club, where viewers read Winfrey-selected books,
was called by some the "singular publishing phenomenon of the decade"; she inked a telefilm deal with ABC whereby the
network would air a series of "Oprah Winfrey Presents" movies produced by Harpo; she launched Oxygen Media, a 24hour cable programming network geared for women; and she prevailed in a lawsuit against her by Texas cattle ranchers
who accused her of influencing the nation against eating beef. Finally, Winfrey produced and appeared in her second
feature film, Beloved, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Toni Morrison. In 2000, she launched O, The Oprah
Magazine, which became the most successful start-up magazine in publishing history with an estimated 2.3 million
readers. Two years later, Harpo Productions, Inc. spearheaded Dr. Phil, a self-help talk show featuring psychologist Phil
McGraw.
Winfrey's success has not dulled her sense of community responsibility; she spends a great deal of her own time, often
unpaid, speaking at churches, schools, and shelters about racism, drug addiction, and other issues. Worth $1.5 billion
dollars according to Forbes magazine, Winfrey spends countless amounts of her own money helping the less fortunate.
She has also used her show to promote community awareness and has raised more than $1 million through her on-air
"Angel Network" for various charities. Most recently, in January 2007, Winfrey broke ground at the Oprah Winfrey
Leadership Academy for Girls in Johannesburg, South Africa, a boarding school that seeks to educate impoverished
South African girls.
Justin Harmon, et. al.
Further Reading
Bly, Nellie. Oprah!: Up Close and Down Home. New York: Kensington, 1993; Landrum, Gene N. Profiles of Female
Genius: Thirteen Creative Women Who Changed the World. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1994; Mair, George.
Oprah Winfrey: The Real Story. Rev. ed. Secaucus, NJ: Carol Pub. Group, 1998; Nicholson, Lois. Oprah Winfrey. New
York: Chelsea House, 1994.
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Harmon, Justin, et. al. "Oprah Winfrey." Pop Culture Universe: Icons, Idols, Ideas. ABC-CLIO, 2014. Web. 3 June 2014.
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Entry ID: 1461665
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