“I saw it as a new form of church,” Oprah Winfrey says of Tyler Perry’s stage work. “It was … [+]
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In Sunday night’s revealing interview with Oprah Winfrey, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle revealed how billionaire filmmaker Tyler Perry stepped in to help the couple. Shortly after announcing that they would stop receiving security protection from the British royal family, Harry and Markle, who were in Canada at the time, began to panic about where they should go and where they would be safe. Perry offered not only one of his homes in Southern California, but full of security information. They waited three months.
Little do people know what Perry has helped Winfrey. The former talk show guest has been a mentor to Perry, who watched her show grow up and give it credit by encouraging him to start writing. He first appeared on her show more than a decade later in 2001; behind the scenes, she gave him a business lesson on the importance of “writing your own studies” and being in complete control.
While that advice was crucial to Perry’s future success, it has also been there for Winfrey. After completing her talk show in 2011 and launching her own network, Winfrey had a hard time. The new network was not immediately successful and some expected it and was criticized in the media for its small audience and lack of direction.
“It was always defined as‘ the struggling OWN network, ’” Winfrey said Forbes in 2019 in an interview about Perry. “I felt very down about it, in fact the worst I have ever had in my life. ”
She opted out on the phone with her friend Perry, and decided to take matters into her own hands, hopping on her private pier in Atlanta and flying out to Winfrey’s home in Santa Barbara.
“He knocked on my door and said, ‘I just want to see your face and make sure you’re okay,'” Winfrey recalled. “Then he turned around and came home.”
He continued the kind journey with a gesture that would change the position of OWN and make anything but a difficult network: he offered to write the first script series of the channel.
He said, ‘Give me a minute.’ It was like an hour and a half, and he’ll come back with this idea for The Have and the Have Nots,Winfrey said, “It’s pregnant.”
Perry completed many more series for the channel and wrote a special contract with the OWN that even saw him own a piece of the network. His series for OWN, incl The Have and the Have Nots and Love your neighbor, some of the channel’s main programs came.
When Perry left the Winfrey network last year to launch his own streaming service with BET, Winfrey gave him his blessing. In fact, she helped show him the way.
“She encouraged me from day one,” he told Forbes. “Watching examples like Oprah, alone Oprah Winfrey Exhibition, and understanding what that meant. That was very important to me. ”
Very important indeed – last year Perry joined Winfrey on the list of world billionaires.