But part of Winfrey’s main claim is that she walks the tour, her impressive billions self-made the materials of American peace stories. She was born in rural poverty in Mississippi to a teenage single mother, lived with her grandmother until the age of six, was raped by multiple family members and became pregnant at the age of 14 as a result of sexual abuse, just so that her baby would die soon after birth.
In school, however, she succeeded, and won a scholarship to Tennessee State University. At 19, she dropped out of her degree when she was offered a job as the youngest and first black female news anchor at WLAC-TV in Nashville. Her emotional style, however, did not go down well on a direct news program, and in 1978 she was moved to a daytime chat chat show, People are talking.
When, in 1984, she moved to Chicago, to take over a morning talk show, the name was abruptly changed from Chicago AM to Oprah Winfrey Exhibition. Oprah had found her “alignment”.
As any good interviewer knows, the best way to get a confession is to offer one of your own. British illustrator and writer Carinthia West, who first met Winfrey on set The purple color, the year after she moved to Chicago, believing that the Oprah Effect comes from just this: her own willingness to show the uncomfortable, ugly side of everything from abuse sexual to her problems with weight.
“I think the wheel has 67lbs of fat on stage [in 1988, to visually represent the weight she had recently lost] and I can’t think of anyone else who would be willing to be so open, ”said West. When she returned to the U.S. to interview Winfrey in the early 1990s, and around that time was the host of a world-famous show, she was greeted with open arms.
“Even though she has great wealth and power now, she is still very much a home girl,” West said. “She has been badly hurt in her own life, so she is attracted to others who, rightly or wrongly, feel hurt by themselves. “
It is not hyperbole to say that she has changed culture; the term ‘Oprahfication’ is defined as “the apparent increase in people’s desire to talk about their feelings or personal problems, due to the influence of television programs”. And, as her own star rose, the admissions came not only from the public, wanting to open up and often shower on screen, but from a growing group. become starry. also.
In addition to her eponymous show, which ran for 25 years and became the highest television show ever in the US, she has her own glossy magazine, O., (for which she is a monthly cover star), an entire television network, OWN, and is one of the most connected women on the planet, with influences far beyond the world of entertainment. She believes she gave more than a million votes to her friend, Barack Obama, with her support for him in the 2008 election, and demands were high and again asking Winfrey herself to run against Donald Trump in the 2020 election ( “Business is not clean. It would kill me,” she said.
It would come as no surprise that the royal couple would want to send their vehicle to Winfrey, although it is not clear who did who. When Winfrey attended the Sussexes wedding in May 2018, it is reported that she met the couple only once, two months earlier, when she was invited to Kensington Palace while on a trip to London. Now, however, they are neighbors; Winfrey’s $ 88 million apartment in Montecito, California (she has a mountain cabin in Telluride, Colorado, a house on Fisher Island, near Miami, and another in Hawaii, as well as a farm in Indiana) is near a new home $ 14 million Meghan and Harry. , and are fond of bombing each other through social media. In December, Winfrey posted a photo of a basket of vegan coffee products from ‘My friend M’, which later reappeared from a company in which Meghan had invested.