Oprah Winfrey: Snapshot
- Name
- Oprah Winfrey
- Date of Birth
- January 29, 1954
- Birth Place
- Kosciusko, Miss.
Now worth more than a billion dollars, Winfrey has succeeded on many fronts – as an Oscar-nominated actress (The Color Purple), activist, magazine editor, producer, book club sponsor and radio host.
She has raised and personally donated millions of dollars to victims of poverty and disease and openly speaks about her own experience with sexual abuse as a child, the baby she had at 14 who did not survive, and of her drug use as a young adult. But, according to Winfrey, none of her achievements make her more proud than the two schools she opened for South Africa's neediest girls.
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Oprah Winfrey: Five Fun Facts
- Oprah Winfrey's first name was supposed to be Orpah, after Ruth's sister-in-law in the Bible, but it was misspelled Oprah on her birth certificate. The name stuck.
- Oprah Winfrey was taught to read at age 3 by her grandmother, helping her develop her knack for public speaking. "[People] would say to my grandmother, 'Hattie Mae, this child sure can talk. She is the talkingest child," Winfrey told CNN.
- Embarrassed by her butterfly-rimmed eyeglasses as a teen, Oprah Winfrey asked her mother to replace them. When she wouldn't, Oprah Winfrey broke them and called the cops. "The story was that someone broke in, hit me on the head and knocked off my glasses," she told the Washington Post. "I lay down and faked amnesia."
- Barbara Walters shaped the budding Oprah Winfrey's interviewing style. "For the first six months I was on the air, I imitated her like crazy," Winfrey told the Los Angeles Times in 1987.
- Oprah Winfrey is the first African-American celebrity to land on the cover of Vogue, in the October 1998 issue. She loses 20 lbs. for the photo shoot. "If you want to be on the cover of Vogue and [editor-in-chief] Anna Wintour says you have to be down to 150 lbs. – that's what you gotta do," Winfrey tells the BBC.
Oprah Winfrey: Biography 
- 1960s
Hard Childhood
Leaving her grandmother's home in Mississippi, Winfrey splits her time between her mother, Vernita, in Milwaukee, Wis., and her father, Vernon, in Nashville, Tenn. She is raped and abused by family friends in Milwaukee. Winfrey moves to Nashville permanently in 1968, secretly pregnant at 14. Her father, a strict disciplinarian, helps her rebuild her life when her week-old baby dies.
- 1971
Beauty Queen
Winfrey wins Nashville's Miss Fire Prevention contest. The pageant sponsor, a radio station, offers Winfrey a job reading the afternoon headlines on air. After being crowned Miss Black Tennessee in 1972, she competes in the Miss Black America competition, but her burgeoning news career and college studies end her pageant days. At 19, she becomes anchor of Nashville's WTVF-TV station and leaves Tennessee State University to be the first female African-American news anchor in Nashville.
- 1983
Windy City Calls
After an eight-year stint cohosting a local morning show in Baltimore, Md., a 29-year-old Winfrey cohosts the talk show AM Chicago, which she eventually takes over. Within months she beats the top-rated Phil Donahue Show in viewership and AM Chicago is renamed The Oprah Winfrey Show.
Photo Credits
Top Left: John Spellman/Retna
BIOGRAPHY (top to bottom): Tennessean; Harrison Jones
