Oprah Winfrey’s Credit

Oprah Winfrey is credited through inventing a more affectionate and confessional type of media communication. Oprah  is thought to have popularized and revolutionized the tabloid talk show genre invented by Phil Donahue, which a Yale study claims broke twentieth century taboos and allowed LGBT individuals to enter the mainstream entertainment. By the mid nineties Oprah had reinvented her show putting focus on literature and self-improvement. Although criticized for unleashing confession culture and publicizing questionable self-help aids. Winfrey is often praised for conquering adversity and developing into benefactor to others. From 2006 to 2008, Oprah Winfrey’s support of Barack Obama, by one approximation, produced over 1,000,000 votes in the close 2008 Democratic primary race.

Oprah Winfrey Before the Show

Oprah Winfrey was born in rural Mississippi into poverty to a single teenaged mother. Winfrey was later raised in an inner-city Milwaukee neighborhood. She experienced ample hardship during her adolescence, claiming to be raped at a young age. Oprah was carrying a child at age fourteen; her son died in infancy. She was sent to be with the man who she calls her dad; a barber in TN. Oprah landed a job in radio at the time she was in high school. She started co-anchoring the evening news at the age of 19. Her passionate unrehearsed conveyance eventually got her transferred to the daytime talk show ring. After pushing a third-rated localized Chicago talk show to first place, Oprah launched her own production company as well as became internationally syndicated.

Oprah’s personal life

Homes

Aerial view of Oprah’s Montecito estate

Winfrey currently lives on “The Promised Land”, her 42-acre (170,000 m²) estate with ocean and mountain views in Montecito, California. Winfrey also owns a house in Lavallette, New Jersey; an apartment in Chicago, an estate on Fisher Island, Florida, a house in Douglasville, Georgia; a ski house in Telluride, Colorado; and property on Maui, Hawaii and Antigua. Her base during filming of Winfrey’s show is Chicago, so she spends time in the neighborhood of Streeterville.

Romantic history

A self-described promiscuous teen who was a victim of sexual abuse, Winfrey gave birth at the age of 14, to a boy who died shortly after.

Winfrey’s high school sweetheart Anthony Otey recalled an innocent courtship that began in Winfrey’s senior year of high school, from which he saved hundreds of love notes; Winfrey conducted herself with dignity and as a model student. The two spoke of getting married, but Otey claimed to have always secretly known that Winfrey was destined for a far greater life than he could ever provide. She broke up with him on Valentine’s Day of her senior year.

In 1971, several months after breaking up with Otey, Winfrey met William “Bubba” Taylor at Tennessee State University. According to CBS journalist George Mair, Taylor was Winfrey’s “first intense, to die for love affair”. Winfrey helped get Taylor a job at WVOL, and according to Mair, “did everything to keep him, including literally begging him on her knees to stay with her.” Taylor however was unwilling to leave Nashville with Winfrey when she moved to Baltimore to work at WJZ-TV in June 1976. “We really did care for each other”, Winfrey would later recall. “We shared a deep love. A love I will never forget.”

In the 1970s, Winfrey had a romantic relationship with John Tesh. Biographer Kitty Kelley claims that Tesh split with Winfrey over the pressure of having an interracial relationship.

When WJZ-TV management criticized Winfrey for crying on the air while reporting tragedies and were unhappy with her physical appearance (especially when her hair fell out as the result of a bad perm), Winfrey turned to reporter Lloyd Kramer for comfort. “Lloyd was just the best”, Winfrey would later recall. “That man loved me even when I was bald! He was wonderful. He stuck with me through the whole demoralizing experience. That man was the most fun romance I ever had.”

According to Mair, when Kramer moved to NBC in New York, Winfrey had a love affair with a married man who had no intention of leaving his wife.^[75] Winfrey would later recall: “I’d had a relationship with a man for four years. I wasn’t living with him. I’d never lived with anyone—and I thought I was worthless without him. The more he rejected me, the more I wanted him. I felt depleted, powerless. At the end I was down on the floor on my knees groveling and pleading with him”. Winfrey became so depressed that on September 8, 1981, she wrote a suicide note to best friend Gayle King instructing King to water her plants. “That suicide note had been much overplayed” Winfrey told Ms. magazine. “I couldn’t kill myself. I would be afraid the minute I did it; something really good would happen and I’d miss it.”

According to Winfrey, her emotional turmoil gradually led to a weight problem: “The reason I gained so much weight in the first place and the reason I had such a sorry history of abusive relationships with men was I just needed approval so much. I needed everyone to like me, because I didn’t like myself much. So I’d end up with these cruel self-absorbed guys who’d tell me how selfish I was, and I’d say ‘Oh thank you, you’re so right’ and be grateful to them. Because I had no sense that I deserved anything else. Which is also why I gained so much weight later on. It was the perfect way of cushioning myself against the world’s disapproval.”

Winfrey later confessed to smoking crack cocaine with a man she was romantically involved with during the same era. She explained on her show: “I always felt that the drug itself is not the problem but that I was addicted to the man.” She added: “I can’t think of anything I wouldn’t have done for that man.”

Winfrey was allegedly involved in a second drug-related love affair. Self-proclaimed former boyfriend Randoph Cook claimed they lived together for several months in 1985 and did drugs. In 1997, Cook tried to sue Winfrey for $20 million for allegedly blocking a tell-all book about their alleged relationship.

Also, in the mid 1980s, Winfrey briefly dated movie critic Roger Ebert, whom she credits with advising her to take her show into syndication.

In 1985 before Winfrey’s Chicago talk show had gone national, Haitian filmmaker Reginald Chevalier claims he appeared as a guest on a look-alike segment and began a relationship with Winfrey involving romantic evenings at home, candlelit baths and dinners with Michael Jordan and Danny Glover. Chevalier claims Winfrey ended the relationship when she met Stedman Graham.

Winfrey and her boyfriend Stedman Graham have been together since 1986. They were engaged to be married in November 1992, but the ceremony never took place.

Close friends

Winfrey’s best friend since their early twenties is Gayle King. King was formerly the host of The Gayle King Show and is currently an editor of O, the Oprah Magazine. Since 1997, when Winfrey played the therapist on an episode of the sitcom Ellen in which Ellen DeGeneres came out of the closet, Winfrey and King have been the target of persistent rumors that they were gay. “I understand why people think we’re gay”, Winfrey says in the August 2006 issue of O magazine. “There isn’t a definition in our culture for this kind of bond between women. So I get why people have to label it—how can you be this close without it being sexual?””I’ve told nearly everything there is to tell. All my stuff is out there. People think I’d be so ashamed of being gay that I wouldn’t admit it? Oh, please.”

Winfrey has also had a long friendship with Maria Shriver after they met in Baltimore. Winfrey considers Maya Angelou, author of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, her mentor and close friend; she calls Angelou her “mother-sister-friend”Winfrey hosted a week-long Caribbean cruise for Angelou and 150 guests for Angelou’s 70th birthday in 1998, and in 2008, threw her “an extravagant 80th birthday celebration” at Donald Trump‘s Mar-A-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida.

Personal wealth

Born in rural poverty, then raised by a mother on welfare in a poor urban neighborhood, Winfrey became a millionaire at age 32 when her talk show went national. Winfrey was in a position to negotiate ownership of the show and start her own production company because of the success and the amount of revenue the show generated. At age 41, Winfrey had a net worth of $340 million and replaced Bill Cosby as the only African American on the Forbes 400. Although black people are just under 13% of the U.S. population, Winfrey has remained the only African American to rank among America’s 400 richest people nearly every year since 1995. With a 2000 net worth of $800 million, Winfrey is believed to be the richest African American of the 20th century. Due to her status as a historical figure, Professor Juliet E.K. Walker of the University of Illinois created the course “History 298: Oprah Winfrey, the Tycoon.” Winfrey was the highest paid TV entertainer in the United States in 2006, earning an estimated $260 million during the year, five times the sum earned by second-place music executive Simon Cowell. By 2008, her yearly income had increased to $275 million.

Forbes’ international rich list has listed Winfrey as the world’s only black billionaire from 2004 to 2006 and as the first black woman billionaire in world history. According to Forbes, in September 2010 Winfrey was worth over $2.7 billion and has overtaken former eBay CEO Meg Whitman as the richest self-made woman in America.

Oprah’s Early life

Winfrey was originally named “Orpah” after the biblical character in the Book of Ruth, but her family and friends “didn’t know how to pronounce it”, and called her “Oprah” instead.^[3]

Winfrey was born in Kosciusko, Mississippi, to an unmarried teenage mother. She later said that her conception was due to a single sexual encounter and the couple broke up not long after.^[21] Her mother, Vernita Lee (born c. 1935), was a housemaid. Winfrey had believed that her biological father was Vernon Winfrey (born 1933), a coal miner turned barber turned city councilman who had been in the Armed Forces when she was born. Decades later, Mississippi farmer and World War II veteran Noah Robinson Sr. (born c. 1925) claimed to be her biological father.^[22] A genetic test in 2006 determined that her maternal line originated among the Kpelle ethnic group, in the area that today is Liberia. Her genetic make up was determined to be 89 percent Sub-Saharan African, 8% Native American, and 3% East Asian; however, the East Asian may, due to the imprecisions of genetic testing, actually be Native American markers.^[23]

After Winfrey’s birth, her mother traveled north and Winfrey spent her first six years living in rural poverty with her grandmother, Hattie Mae Lee (April 15, 1900 – February 27, 1963), who was so poor that Winfrey often wore dresses made of potato sacks, for which the local children made fun of her.^[24] Her grandmother taught her to read before the age of three and took her to the local church, where she was nicknamed “The Preacher” for her ability to recite Bible verses. When Winfrey was a child, her grandmother would hit her with a switch when she did not do chores or if she misbehaved in any way.^{[citation needed]}

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.^[25] Around the time Winfrey moved in, Lee had given birth to another daughter, Winfrey’s younger half-sister, Patricia^[26] who later (on February 2003, at age 43) died of causes related to cocaine addiction.^[27] By 1962, Lee was having difficulty raising both daughters so Winfrey was temporarily sent to live with Vernon in Nashville, Tennessee.^[28] While Winfrey was in Nashville, Lee gave birth to a third daughter.^[29] Lee gave this daughter, later also named Patricia, up for adoption in the hope of easing the financial straits that had led to Lee’s being on welfare.^[30] Winfrey did not learn she had a second half-sister until 2010.^[30] By the time Winfrey moved back in with Lee, Lee had also given birth to a boy named Jeffrey, Winfrey’s half-brother, who died of AIDS-related causes in 1989.^[27]

Winfrey has stated she was molested by her cousin, her uncle, and a family friend, starting when she was nine years old, something she first claimed to her viewers on a 1986 episode of her TV show, when sexual abuse was being discussed.^[31][32] When Winfrey discussed the alleged abuse with family members at age 24, they refused to accept what she said.^[33] Winfrey once commented that she had chosen not to be a mother because she had not been mothered well.^[34]

At 13, after suffering years of abuse, Winfrey ran away from home. When she was 14, she became pregnant, her son dying shortly after birth.She later said she felt betrayed by the family member who had sold the story to the National Enquirer in 1990. She began going to Lincoln High School; but after early success in the Upward Bound program, was transferred to the affluent suburban Nicolet High School, where she says her poverty was constantly rubbed in her face as she rode the bus to school with fellow African-Americans, some of whom were servants of her classmates’ families. She began to steal money from her mother in an effort to keep up with her free-spending peers, to lie to and argue with her mother, and to go out with older boys.

Her frustrated mother once again sent her to live with Vernon in Nashville, Tennessee, though this time she did not take her back. Vernon was strict but encouraging, and made her education a priority. Winfrey became an honors student, was voted Most Popular Girl, and joined her high school speech team at East Nashville High School, placing second in the nation in dramatic interpretation.^{[citation needed]} She won an oratory contest, which secured her a full scholarship to Tennessee State University, a historically black institution, where she studied communication. Her first job as a teenager was working at a local grocery store.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.

Winfrey’s career choice in media would not have surprised her grandmother, who once said that ever since Winfrey could talk, she was on stage. As a child she played games interviewing her corncob doll and the crows on the fence of her family’s property. Winfrey later acknowledged her grandmother’s influence, saying it was Hattie Mae who had encouraged her to speak in public and “gave me a positive sense of myself”.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. She also hosted the local version of Dialing for Dollars there as well.

A Bio about the great “OPRAH”

Oprah Winfrey was born Orpah Gail Winfrey on January 29, 1954. Oprah Winfrey is an American TV host, actress, producer, and humanitarian.

What’s So Special About Oprah Winfrey’s Story?

Oprah Winfrey is far more than just a celebrity; Oprah has established herself as a brand. Rather than being content to let her early life and career hold her back, Oprah has proven that the ideal of the American Dream still holds true.

No longer just the host of a widely popular and successful talk show, Oprah Winfrey has encouraged a nation to read a variety of modern novels and classics, launched her own successful media empire and has acted in a number of well-respected films – along with producing made for TV movies.

Oprah’s story is not simply a matter of building an empire out of nothing, however. It’s about expressing gratitude, her wish to help others reach their potential and to create their best lives as well.

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