Oprah Winfrey

Oprah Winfrey (born Orpah Gail Winfrey;^[1] January 29, 1954) is an American media proprietor, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist. Winfrey is best known for her self-titled, multi-award-winning talk show, which has become the highest-rated program of its kind in history and was nationally syndicated from 1986 to 2011.^[4] She has been ranked the richest African-American of the 20th century,^[5] the greatest black philanthropist in American history,^[6][7] and was for a time the world's only black billionaire.^[8][9] She is also, according to some assessments, the most influential woman in the world.^[10][11]

Winfrey was born into poverty in rural Mississippi to a teenage single mother and later raised in an inner-city Milwaukee neighborhood. She experienced considerable hardship during her childhood, claiming to be raped at age nine and becoming pregnant at 14; her son died in infancy.^[12] Sent to live with the man she calls her father, 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. Her emotional ad-lib delivery eventually got her transferred to the daytime-talk-show arena, and after boosting a third-rated local Chicago talk show to first place,^[8] she launched her own production company and became internationally syndicated.
Credited with creating a more intimate confessional form of media communication,^[13] she is thought to have popularized and revolutionized^[13][14] the tabloid talk show genre pioneered by Phil Donahue,^[13] which a Yale study claims broke 20th century taboos and allowed LGBT people to enter the mainstream.^[15][16] By the mid 1990s, she had reinvented her show with a focus on literature, self-improvement, and spirituality. Though criticized for unleashing confession culture, promoting controversial self-help ideas,^[17] and an emotion-centered approach^[18] she is often praised for overcoming adversity to become a benefactor to others.^[19] From 2006 to 2008, her support of Barack Obama, by one estimate, delivered over a million votes in