Oprah Winfrey - she was named the most powerful women in Hollywood in the Hollywood Reporter's annual list of most powerful females in the US movie capital. She was chosed based on her dizzying array of Oprah branded media and immense cultural influence as said by Elizabeth Guider, editor-in-chief.
But who is Oprah Winfrey ?
Oprah Gail Winfrey (born January 29, 1954), often referred to simply as Oprah, is an American television host, media mogul, and philanthropist. Her internationally-syndicated talk show, The Oprah Winfrey Show, has earned her multiple Emmy Awards and is the highest-rated talk show in the history of television. She is also an influential book critic, an Academy Award nominated actress, and a magazine publisher. She has been ranked the richest African American of the 20th century, the most philanthropic African American of all time, and was once the world's only black billionaire, the most influential woman in the world.
Born in rural Mississippi to a poor teenage single mother and later raised in an inner city Milwaukee neighborhood, at age six, winfrey moved to an inner-city neighborhood in Milwaukee, Wisconsin with her mother, who was less supportive and encouraging than her grandmother had been, due in large part to the long hours Vernita Lee worked as a maid. Winfrey was raped at age 9 by her cousins and at 14years old gave birth to a son, who died in infancy,something she first revealed to her viewers on a 1986 episode of her TV show, when sexual abuse was being discussed. Sent to live with the man she calls her father, Vernon, 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. Sorry missed - at age 17, Winfrey won the Miss Black Tennessee beauty pageant.She also attracted the attention of the local black radio station, WVOL, which hired her to do the news part-time.She worked there during her senior year of high school, and again while in her first two years of college.
Working in local media, she was both the youngest news anchor and the first black female news anchor at Nashville's WLAC-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's career really began to take off after moving to Chicago in 1984 to host "AM Chicago", an early morning talk show at WLS-TV's. It went on to become the number one ranked talk show shortly after she started and it was renamed "The Oprah Winfrey Show" after one year.
The Oprah Winfrey Show went on to become one of the most successful and highest ranked television talk show programs in history. The program is viewed by more than 20 million Americans every week and broadcast Internationally to more than one hundred countries worldwide. Winfrey's production company "Harpo Productions, Inc" produces the program and she is the host.
The daytime talk show focuses on issues close to Winfrey's heart and she has continued to cover topics of value to her mostly female audience for more than 17 successful seasons of broadcasting. The Oprah Winfrey Show started the wildly influential "Oprah's Book Club" in 1996. In Movies -In 1985, Winfrey co-starred in Steven Spielberg's epic film adaptation of Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-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. The Color Purple has now been made into a Broadway musical and opened late 2005, with Winfrey credited as a producer.
In October 1998, Winfrey produced and starred in the film Beloved, based upon Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize winning novel of the same name. To prepare for her role as Sethe, the protagonist and former slave, Winfrey experienced a 24-hour simulation of the experience of slavery, which included being tied up and blindfolded and left alone in the woods
Winfrey publishes two magazines: O, The Oprah Magazine and O at Home. She has co-authored five books,with announcement of her future weight loss book.
Winfrey currently lives on “The Promised Land”, her 42-acre estate with ocean and mountain views in Montecito, California, outside of Santa Barbara. Winfrey also owns a house in Lavallette, New Jersey, an apartment in Chicago, an estate on Fisher Island off the coast of Miami, a ski house in Telluride, Colorado, and property on the island of Maui, Hawaii. She also owns a home on the island of Antigua. Winfrey's show is based in Chicago, so she spends time there, specifically in the neighborhood of Streeterville, but she otherwise resides in California. Her Hawaii property was featured on the cover of O at Home.Winfrey's best friend since their early twenties is Gayle King & Maria Shriver.
Watch her show ...................................
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