Oprah Gail Winfrey
Hi friends, I hope you're fine?
I often hear about Oprah Winfrey but otherwise I do not really know this woman. Recently, I heard on the radio that she could be President of the United States. Why not ? But who is she to be seen as the future US President?
Oprah Gail Winfrey was born in Mississippi in 1954 and became an American television and film host and producer, actress, literary critic, and magazine publisher.
She is also known for her talk show The Oprah Winfrey Show produced by her own Chicago-based company. His talk show won several awards and became the most-watched program in television history until his last episode on May 25, 2011.
Oprah is also an actress who has been nominated for Oscars. She was ranked as the richest African-American personality of the twentieth century and the most philanthropic of all time.
She is the richest black billionaire in the world
She has been considered as the queen of the talk show launched by Phil Donahue previously.
In the 1990s, she reinvented her talk show to focus on literature, personal development, spirituality, and meditation.
She is also highly admired for her philanthropy.
She was put in the limelight during the interview she made with Michael Jackson in January 1993, at his home in California.
She also talked about her during a scandal against the Hermès brand, indeed, the Parisian shop denied him access, a quarter of an hour before closing.
In 2006, she became an early supporter of Barack Obama. Indeed, it allowed him to get more than a million votes in the 2008 Democratic primary race, a success for which the governor of Illinois has considered offering him a seat in the United States Senate. She is perceived as a potential candidate in the US presidential election of 2020 to face Donald Trump.
Her youth
Oprah Winfrey is the result of a sexual relationship that both her parents had teenagers before separating soon after. His mother, Vernita Lee, was a servant. Growing up, she thought her father was Vernon Winfrey, working as a miner, then a hairdresser, before becoming a city councilor. When Oprah was born, he was in the army.
Decades later, a Mississippi farmer and World War II veteran claimed to be his biological father. After her birth, Oprah Winfrey's mother moved north and Oprah spent the first six years in a poor neighborhood with her grandmother.
She often wore dresses made of sacks of potatoes that made her the target of other children's mockery.
Her grandmother taught her to read before the age of three and took her to the local church, where she was nicknamed "the preacher" for her ability to recite Bible verses.
At the age of six, she moved to a neighborhood in downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin with her mother who, because of her job as a cleaning lady, had less time to look after her than her grandmother.
She said she was raped by several family members and a family friend at the age of nine and publicly disclosed these facts in her talk show, which was about sexual abuse in 1986.
Despite her family problems, Oprah is a good student and, at age 13, receives a scholarship to go to Nicolet High School in the suburbs of Milwaukee.
At 14, she gives birth to a boy, who dies shortly thereafter. His mother then sends him to live with his father in Nashville, Tennessee. His father is strict but he encourages and makes his education a priority.
Oprah is a brilliant student. In high school, she joined the eloquence group at her school in Nashville and placed second at the national level in dramatic interpretation.
She won an eloquence contest, which earned her a scholarship at Tennessee State University, a black student institution, where she studied communication.
Her first job as a teenager is in a grocery store. At the age of 17, Oprah participated in the Miss Black America election as Miss Black Tennessee. It also attracts the attention of a black radio station that hires it to present the information. She works there during her last year of high school and during her first two years at university.
Oprah's choice of media career does not surprise her grandmother, who says that since she knows how to talk, Oprah is like on stage.
As a child, she was having fun interviewing her corn doll and crows on the fence of the family home.
Oprah later acknowledged her grandmother's influence, saying she was the one who encouraged her to speak in public and gave her a positive sense of herself.
She is the youngest news anchor and the first black woman to work as a television presenter.
She continued her media career and was later recruited to join Richard Sher as co-presenter of the local talk show "People Are Talking", first presented on August 14, 1978.
Television
In 1983, Oprah Winfrey moved to Chicago to present the AM Chicago TV program on WLS-TV. Broadcast in the morning for half an hour, it is, on its arrival, the least watched program. The first episode airs on January 2, 1984. In the following months, the show finally manages to exceed the audience of Donahue, the most followed talk show in Chicago.
His, renamed The Oprah Winfrey Show, became an hour-long talk show and began airing nationally on September 8, 1986.
For the 20th anniversary of her show, Oprah Winfrey reports that film critic Roger Ebert is the person who persuaded her to sign a contract with King World. Ebert had expected that it would generate 40 times more income than his television program At the Movies. After overtaking Donahue in the local market, Oprah Winfrey's talk show quickly doubles her national audience, becoming the number one talk show in America.
It was said then very sympathetic, touching, big, brazen, strong, dynamic, laughable, kind, moving, tender, down-to-earth and voracious.
In the mid-1990s, she adopted a less celebrity format by offering shows on women's sentimental issues, geopolitics, spirituality and meditation. She interviews celebrities about issues that directly involve them, such as cancer, philanthropy, or abuse. In addition, she interviews unknown individuals who have done extraordinary things or who have become involved in important current issues.
In 1993, Oprah Winfrey performed exceptional interviews like the one with Michael Jackson, which became the fourth most watched event in American television history with one hundred million viewers.
Another notable show was the first episode of the nineteenth season of the talk show in the fall of 2004. During the show every member who attended received a new Pontiac G6; the 276 cars were donated by Pontiac as an advertising action. The show has garnered so much media attention that even car taxes have become controversial.
Oprah Winfrey signs a contract to extend her show until the 2010-2011 season, that is to say until her twenty-five seasons. It plans to present 140 episodes per season, until the final season which will include only 130.
Oprah Winfrey presents, with Tom Cruise, the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize concert featuring musical performances by Cyndi Lauper, Andrea Bocelli, Joss Stone, Chris Botti, Diana Krall, Tony Bennett, and others
In addition to presenting and appearing on TV shows, Oprah Winfrey co-founded a women's cable television network: Oxygen. She is also president of Harpo Productions.
On January 15, 2008, Oprah Winfrey and Discovery Communications announced plans to change Discovery Health Channel to a new channel called OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network. The channel has been operational since January 4, 2011 and broadcasts various programs.
Contractually Oprah Winfrey must appear live 70 hours a year on her pay channel. The channel is available in more than 70 million homes due to the current position of Discovery Health Channel. It's a non-monetary affair, Oprah Winfrey giving control of her Oprah.com website to Discovery Communications.
His income
Born in the countryside and raised by a poor mother in a disadvantaged urban neighborhood, Oprah Winfrey became a millionaire at the age of 32 when her show became national.
Indeed, she was in a position to negotiate the rights of her show and start her own production company because of the success and the amount of income it produced.
In 1994, the show's audience was still high and Oprah Winfrey negotiated a nine-digit annual contract. She was considered the richest woman in the entertainment field in the early 1990s.
At 41, Oprah Winfrey's fortune reached a net worth of $ 340 million. She replaced Bill Cosby as the only Afro-American listed on Forbes. Although black people are below 13% of the US population, Oprah Winfrey remained the only African-American rich enough to rank among the 400 wealthiest people in America almost every year since 1995.
With $ 800 million in 2000, Oprah Winfrey is one of the richest actresses of the twentieth century.
The international list of Forbes' richest people ranked Oprah Winfrey as the world's only black billionaire in 2004, 2005 and 2006, and the first black woman to become a billionaire in world history.
According to Forbes, her total wealth was more than $ 2.7 billion, as of September 2008. She thus overtook the former general manager of eBay's e-commerce site, Meg Whitman, as the woman in charge. richer in America.
It would have earned $ 315 million between 2009 and 2010 alone.
His philanthropy
In 1998, Oprah Winfrey launched Oprah's Angel Network, a charity helping people in need around the world. As a result, Oprah's Angel Network maintains charitable projects around the world and provides grants to non-profit organizations that share this vision.
Although the Oprah Winfrey show is known for collecting money through public charity, the cars and gifts it offers on its show are often donated by companies in exchange for advertising. In reality, Oprah Winfrey gives more of her own money to charity than any other celebrity in America. In 2005, she became the first black person listed by Business Week as one of the most generous philanthropists of the Top 50 in America. It has given $ 303 million or so.
She has been ranked several times as the most philanthropic celebrity.
Following Hurricane Katrina, Oprah asked her viewers to donate money. This request was a great success because, as of September 2006, donations to Oprah's Angel Network for Katrina amounted to more than $ 11 million. Thanks to these donations, houses were built in four states: Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama only a year after Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita. Oprah Winfrey has also donated $ 10 million to her viewers' donations.
Oprah Winfrey also helped 250 African-American men continue or begin their studies at Morehouse University in Atlanta, Georgia.
Oprah Winfrey was the first winner of the Bob Hope Humanitarian Award at the 2002 Emmy Awards for her service to television and film.
To celebrate her two decades on national television and thank her employees for their work, Oprah Winfrey brought her personal team and their families (1,065 people in total) on vacation to Hawaii in summer 2006. Nice boss 😎
In 2011, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award was awarded to him for his philanthropic actions.
Political recommendation
Oprah Winfrey joins Barack and Michelle Obama at Grant Park in Chicago during the election campaign on December 10, 2007.
Oprah Winfrey exercised political influence by supporting candidate Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential election. This is the first time she has publicly demonstrated such support. Oprah Winfrey raised money for Obama on September 8, 2007 in Santa Barbara.
In December 2007, Oprah Winfrey joined Obama for a series of meetings in the primary states of Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. The event in Colombia and South Carolina on December 9, 2007 gathered a crowd of nearly 30,000 people, the largest gathering of 2007.
An analysis of two economists from the University of Maryland, found that the support of Oprah Winfrey allowed Obama to get between 423,123 and 1596,995 votes.
Although Oprah Winfrey is not one of the celebrities born with a silver spoon in her mouth and had a very difficult childhood between her parents, her grandmother, her rapes, her poverty, the loss painful of a child, we can say that this woman has merit and that if she did so well it was thanks to her and her dad who trusted her and pushed her to study.
She is a very generous lady and I see her becoming the first President of the United States, I think she would lead this country in a very intelligent and especially human way.
I hope you liked this article and you really know this lady that we often hear about but personally I did not know the difficult course.