Oprah Winfrey: Snapshot

Oprah Winfrey: Five Fun Facts

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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."
4. 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.
5. 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

September

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.

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Oprah Winfrey: Special Feature