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Image:Oprahwinfrey.jpg|right|thumb|250px|Oprah
Winfrey, at the start of the 2004-2005 season.

Oprah Gail Winfrey (born January 29, 1954 in
Kosciusko, Mississippi|Kosciusko, Mississippi) is
one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the
United States.  She is currently involved in many
business ventures, but is most identified with her
massively popular and eponymous talk show. She is
currently ranked as the most powerful celebrity by
Forbes magazine,
http://www.forbes.com/lists/2005/53/Rank_1.html as
well as the ninth most powerful woman in the
world.
http://www.forbes.com/lists/2005/11/O0ZT.html

==Biography==
===Youth and early career===
Winfrey was born to a poor family — her
unmarried teenage parents were a housemaid,
Vernita Lee, and a soldier, Vernon Winfrey.  Her
birth certificate has Orpah, after the Moabite
woman in the Book of Ruth of the Bible, but family
and neighbors transposed the R and the P when
pronouncing and writing her name. Eventually,
Oprah became the accepted name.

Winfrey began her career in broadcasting at age
19.  She was both the youngest news anchor and the
first African-American female news anchor at
Nashville's WTVF-TV. She moved to Baltimore's
WJZ-TV in 1976 to co-anchor the six o'clock news. 
She was then recruited to join Richard Sher as
co-host of WJZ's local talk show, People Are
Talking, which premiered on August 14, 1978.

Winfrey is a graduate of Tennessee State
University, a Historically Black Institution.

===Success in television and movies===
In 1983, Winfrey relocated to Chicago, Illinois to
take over as host of WLS-TV's low-rated half-hour
morning talk show, AM Chicago, which premiered on
New Year's Day, 1984.  The show was so successful
with Winfrey as host that it was renamed The Oprah
Winfrey Show, expanded to an hour, and debuted
nationally on September 8, 1986. Originally, the
show followed traditional talk show formats. By
the mid 1990s, however, the format became more
serious, addressing issues that Winfrey thought
were of direct importance and of crucial
consequence to women. Winfrey began to do a lot of
charity work, and her show featured people
suffering from poverty or the victims of
unfortunate accidents.

In 1985, Winfrey co-starred in Steven Spielberg's
epic adaptation of Alice Walker's award-winning
novel The Color Purple. She earned immediate
acclaim as Sofia, the distraught housewife. The
following year Winfrey was nominated for an
Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, but she
lost to Anjelica Huston. Many think this was due
in part to the AMPAS's "Anti-Spielberg" bias,
thinking the film would've been better if directed
by an African-American director.

===Influence===
Winfrey has often discussed openly various aspects
of her life, including those more unpleasant ones,
with the media, including a sexual abuse|sexually
abusive childhood and a problem with drugs as an
adult. In 1990, while filming the series Brewster
Place (a spin-off of her TV movie The Women of
Brewster Place), her half-sister Patricia
Lee-Lloyd revealed that Winfrey had become
pregnant at age 14 and delivered a stillborn boy.
Winfrey's weight fluctuations have caused her to
be considered a weight-loss guru. In the late
1990s, Winfrey introduced her Oprah's Book
Club|book club on television. Whenever Winfrey
introduced a new book as her book-club selection,
the book instantly became a best-seller, a
powerful demonstration of Winfrey's influence. For
example, when she selected the classic John
Steinbeck novel East of Eden, it soared hundreds
of thousands of places to the top of the book
charts, again.

During a show about Mad Cow disease with Howard
Lyman aired on April 16, 1996, Winfrey exclaimed,
"It has just stopped me cold from eating another
burger!" Texas cattlemen lawsuit|sued her and
Lyman in early 1998 for "false defamation of
perishable food" and "business disparagement,"
claiming that Winfrey's remarks subsequently sent
cattle prices tumbling, costing beef producers
some $12 million. After a trial spanning over two
months in a court in the thick of Texas cattle
country, the jury found on February 26 that
Winfrey was not guilty, did not act with malice,
and was not liable for damages. After the trial,
she received a postcard from Rosie O'Donnell
reading, "Congratulations, you beat the meat!"  It
was during this trial that Winfrey hired Dr. Phil
McGraw's company (Courtroom Sciences, Inc) to help
her analyze and read the jury. Dr. Phil made such
an impression on Winfrey that she invited him to
be on her show.  He accepted the invitation and
the rest is history.  Winfrey's production
company, Harpo Productions, produces Dr. Phil's
show. In 2004, despite her celebrity status, the
billionaire Winfrey was chosen to serve on a
murder trial jury in Chicago, Illinois. The trial
ended with the jury voting to convict a man of
murder in a case involving an argument over a
conterfeit $50
bill.http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/tv_a
nd_radio/3572136.stm
http://news.elitestv.com/pub/2004/Aug/EEN41246835e
91bd.html

Winfrey has started
http://www.oprah.com/uyl/oan_landing.jhtml The
Angel Network, an organization that collects
millions of dollars a year for charities. She
publishes her own magazines, O, The Oprah Magazine
and O at Home, and cofounded the women's cable
television network Oxygen (TV channel)|Oxygen. She
is the president of Harpo Productions (Oprah
spelled backwards), which, among other things,
produced the screen adaptation of the Toni
Morrison novel Beloved. Winfrey has also ventured
into acting, most notably in the screen adaptation
of the Alice Walker novel The Color Purple (for
which she received an Academy Award|Oscar
nomination) and in her own production Beloved
(movie)|Beloved. Winfrey is also a published
author, and was the recipient of the first Bob
Hope Humanitarian Award at the 2002 Emmy Awards.
Winfrey is based in Chicago, Illinois but has a
home in Montecito, California; she is reported to
have recently been buying property on Maui.

Winfrey recently made a deal to extend her show
until the 2010-2011 season, by which time it will
have been on the air twenty-five years.  She also
plans to host 140 episodes per season, until her
final season, when it will return to its current
number, 130.
http://thecelebritycafe.com/features/1724.html

===Personal life===
Oprah Winfrey is believed to be worth over $1.3
billion according to the 2005 Forbes Magazine
Issue. She currently lives on her 42 acre (170,000
m²) ocean view estate in Montecito,
California, outside of Santa Barbara,
California|Santa Barbara.  Allegedly Winfrey was
at a party the previous owners were throwing and
fell in love with the estate such that she offered
to buy it for $50 million, although it was not for
sale.  Winfrey also owns a house in Lavalette, New
Jersey.

Winfrey has never married, but has lived with her
partner Steadman Graham for nearly 20 years. She
recently told audiences that she was going to
reveal a deep dark secret — that she and
Steadman have a daughter. She even used this as
the tease for an upcoming episode. It turns out
that this "daughter" is her cocker spaniel.

==Criticism==
Oprah Winfrey has been scrutinized by conservative
critics for allegedly championing liberal causes.
One critic, Myrna Blyth, editor-in-chief of
Ladies' Home Journal magazine from 1981 to 2002,
charges in her book Spin Sisters: How the Women of
the Media Sell Unhappiness— and
Liberalism—to the Women of America, that the
"elite women of the media" allegedly sell
unhappiness to women and tout false advice.
http://www.700club.com/cbnnews/news/040423a.asp

Additionally, some believe there to be a
feminism|feministic gender bias in many of her
shows, and a double standard about certain
behavior. Shows about infidelity, for example,
often focus either on the cheating men, or on the
cheated-on wives.  Critics believe Winfrey pays
inadequate attention to cheating women, or only
makes note of them in a throwaway, dismissive
manner.

==Filmography==
===Television===
*The Oprah Winfrey Show (1986-present)  
*The Women of Brewster Place (1989) (also
executive producer)
*Brewster Place (1990-1991)
*Lincoln (1992) (documentary) (narrator)
*There Are No Children Here (1993)
*Before Women Had Wings (1997) (also producer)

As executive producer/producer:
*The Women of Brewster Place (1989)
*Overexposed (1992)
*Before Women Had Wings (1997)
*The Wedding (1998)
*David and Lisa (1998)
*Tuesdays with Morrie (1999)
*Amy & Isabelle (2001)
*Their Eyes Were Watching God (2005)

===Movies===
*The Color Purple (1985)
*Native Son (1986)
*Throw Momma from the Train (1987) (Cameo)
*Listen Up: The Lives of Quincy Jones (1990)
(documentary)
*Beloved (movie)|Beloved (1998) (also producer)
*Unchained Memories: Readings from the Slave
Narratives (2003) (documentary) (narrator)
*Brothers of the Borderland (2004) (short subject)
(narrator)
*Emmanuel's Gift (2005) (documentary) (narrator)
*Charlotte's Web (2006) (voice) (currently
filming) 
*Bee Movie (2007) (voice) (currently in
pre-production)

==See also==
*List of billionaires

==External links==


* http://www.nndb.com/people/466/000022400/ NNDB
Proflie: Oprah Winfrey
* http://www.oprah.com/ Oprah.com
* imdb name|id=0001856|name=Oprah Winfrey
* http://www.oprahwinfrey.de/ www.oprahwinfrey.de
* http://www.fembio.org/women/oprah-winfrey.shtml
Oprah Winfrey: Biography at FemBio.org
* http://www.celebsoup.com/Oprah_Winfrey.html
Oprah news, video fansite
*
http://www.kingofsearch.com/directorypeo/oprahfact
s.htm Oprah - Fast Facts
*
http://www.cnn.com/2005/SHOWBIZ/TV/06/22/oprah.apo
logy/index.html Luxury store apologizes to Oprah,
Luxury store Hermes on Wednesday apologized to
Oprah Winfrey for turning her away (22 June 2005,
CNN).