Oprah Winfrey

Orpah Gail Winfrey was born on January 29, 1954, in Kosciusko, Mississippi. Her mother, Vernita Lee, was a teenage housemaid. Her father, Vernon Winfrey, was a coal miner, a barber, and later a Nashville city councilman. Her first name was misspelled on her birth certificate, and the misspelling stuck. She spent her first six years on her grandmother Hattie Mae's farm outside Kosciusko, where she learned to read by age three and recited Bible verses in the local church.

She moved to Milwaukee to live with her mother at age six. The years she spent in Milwaukee and Nashville were marked by poverty and by the sexual abuse she has described publicly since her 1986 national broadcast and in every decade since. At thirteen she ran away. At fourteen she gave birth to a son who died in infancy. Her father took her to live with him in Nashville and set rules: read a book a week, write a report, and come home by curfew. She credits that household with the shape of everything that followed.

She won a scholarship to Tennessee State University in 1971 and began studying speech and drama. At seventeen she won the Miss Black Tennessee pageant, and WVOL radio in Nashville hired her to read the news part-time. By nineteen she was co-anchoring the evening broadcast at WLAC-TV Nashville, the youngest and the first Black woman in that role at the station.

In 1976 WJZ-TV Baltimore hired her as a co-anchor on the evening news. The fit was wrong from the start. She cried on air during a story about a house fire. The news director removed her from the anchor desk in 1977, telling her she was unfit for television. The station reassigned her to a morning talk program called People Are Talking. She thrived there. The format that defined her career, the intimate long-form conversation, was built out of the desk she had been pushed away from.

In 1984 she moved to Chicago to host AM Chicago, a low-rated morning show at WLS-TV. Within a month she had passed Phil Donahue in the local ratings. Within a year the show was renamed The Oprah Winfrey Show. In 1986 it went into national syndication with King World Productions, and it hit number one in its time slot in its first season. It stayed there for 24 consecutive seasons.

She founded Harpo Productions in 1986 and took ownership of her own show in 1988, a move that was almost unheard of for a talk-show host at the time. She built Harpo Studios on the West Side of Chicago, becoming the first Black woman to own a major production studio in the United States. The ownership structure was the financial engine behind everything that came after. She was not a host on someone else's show. She was the show and the company that made it.

In 1985 Steven Spielberg cast her as Sofia in The Color Purple. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, the first Black actress nominated in that category. She went on to produce or executive-produce Beloved (1998), Selma (2014), Queen Sugar (2016 to 2022), and When They See Us (2019), each with Ava DuVernay as director or showrunner on the last three.

The Book Club she founded in September 1996 changed the publishing industry. A single recommendation could move a million copies of a title within weeks. She selected Toni Morrison four times. She selected James McBride, Isabel Wilkerson, Colson Whitehead, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Cormac McCarthy. The aggregate sales of books she selected for the Book Club exceeded 55 million copies.

In 1996 she aired a show on mad cow disease in which she said she would never eat another hamburger. The Texas cattle industry sued her under a state food-disparagement law. The trial ran in Amarillo in 1998. She broadcast her show from Texas for six weeks during the trial. The jury ruled in her favor. The decade-long legal aftermath of the case confirmed her willingness to spend years defending a single broadcast on its merits.

In 2000 she launched O, The Oprah Magazine with Hearst, which ran for twenty years and reached a peak monthly circulation above 2.5 million. In 2011 she launched OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network with Discovery Communications and retired The Oprah Winfrey Show after 4,561 episodes. Tyler Perry became the primary scripted-drama partner at OWN. Ava DuVernay produced Queen Sugar there.

She finally graduated from Tennessee State University in 1987, a year after her show went national. She had been one course short since 1975. She completed the degree by submitting a thesis and gave the commencement address the same day she received the diploma. She made a $25 million cumulative gift to Morehouse College funding endowed scholarships for generations of students.

She became the first Black person ever to appear on the Forbes list of billionaires in 2003 and she remains there. Her net worth, estimated above $3 billion, is the output of three decades of owning her own work.