Oprah Winfrey BiographyEntertainment Executive
Oprah Winfrey Date of birth: January 29, 1954 |  Print Biography |
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Born to an unwed teenage mother, Oprah Winfrey spent her first years on her grandmother's farm in Kosciusko, Mississippi, while her mother looked for work in the North. Life on the farm was primitive, but her grandmother taught her to read at an early age, and at age three Oprah was reciting poems and Bible verses in local churches. Despite the hardships of her physical environment, she enjoyed the loving support of her grandmother and the church community, who cherished her as a gifted child. Her world changed for the worse at age six, when she was sent to Milwaukee to live with her mother, who had found work as a housemaid. In the long days when her mother was absent from their inner city apartment, young Oprah was repeatedly molested by male relatives and another visitor. The abuse, which lasted from the ages of nine to 13, was emotionally devastating. When she tried to run away, she was sent to a juvenile detention home, only to be denied admission because all the beds were filled. At 14, she was out of the house and on her own. By her own account, she was sexually promiscuous as a teenager. After giving birth to a baby boy who died in infancy, she went to Nashville, Tennessee to live with her father.
Vernon Winfrey was a strict disciplinarian, but he gave his daughter the secure home life she needed. He saw to it that she met a curfew, and he required her to read a book and write a book report each week. "As strict as he was," says Oprah, "he had some concerns about me making the best of my life, and would not accept anything less than what he thought was my best." In this structured environment, Oprah flourished, and became an honor student, winning prizes for oratory and dramatic recitation. At age 17, Oprah Winfrey won the Miss Black Tennessee beauty pageant and was offered an on-air job at WVOL, a radio station serving the African American community in Nashville. She also won a full scholarship to Tennessee State University, where she majored in Speech Communications and Performing Arts. Oprah continued to work at WVOL in her first years of college, but her broadcasting career was already taking off. She left school and signed on with a local television station as a reporter and anchor. In 1976, she moved to Baltimore to join WJZ-TV News as a co-anchor. There, she co-hosted her first talk show, People Are Talking, while continuing to serve as anchor and news reporter. She had found a niche that perfectly suited her outgoing, empathetic personality, and word soon spread to other cities. In January 1984, she was invited to Chicago to host a faltering half-hour morning program on WLS-TV. In less than a year, she turned AM Chicago into the hottest show in town. The format was soon expanded to an hour, and in September 1985 it was renamed The Oprah Winfrey Show.
A year later, The Oprah Winfrey Show was broadcast nationally, and quickly became the number one talk show in national syndication. In 1987, its first year of eligibility, the show received three Daytime Emmy Awards in the categories of Outstanding Host, Outstanding Talk/Service Program and Outstanding Direction. The following year, the show received its second consecutive Emmy as Outstanding Talk/Service Program, and Oprah herself received the International Radio and Television Society's "Broadcaster of the Year" Award. She was the youngest person ever to receive the honor. By the time America fell in love with Oprah Winfrey the talk show host, she had already captured the nation's attention with her poignant portrayal of Sofia in Steven Spielberg's 1985 adaptation of Alice Walker's novel, The Color Purple. Winfrey's performance earned her nominations for an Oscar and a Golden Globe Award as Best Supporting Actress. Critics again lauded her performance in Native Son, a movie adaptation of Richard Wright's classic 1940 novel. Her love of acting and her desire to bring quality entertainment projects into production prompted her to form her own production company, Harpo Productions, Inc., in 1986. Today, Harpo is a formidable force in film and television production, as well as magazine publishing and the Internet. In 1988, Harpo Productions, Inc. acquired ownership and all production responsibilities for The Oprah Winfrey Show from Capitol Cities/ABC, making Oprah Winfrey the first woman in history to own and produce her own talk show. The following year, Harpo produced its first television miniseries, The Women of Brewster Place, with Oprah Winfrey as star and Executive Producer. It was quickly followed by the TV movies There Are No Children Here (1993), and Before Women Had Wings(1997), which she both produced and appeared in.
Initially, The Oprah Winfrey Show followed a model established by other daytime talk shows, employing sensational stories and outrageous guests to attract viewers, but since the 1990s, Oprah began to emphasize spiritual values, healthy living and self-help, and her program became more popular than ever. Motivated in part by her own memories of childhood abuse, she initiated a campaign to establish a national database of convicted child abusers, and testified before a U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on behalf of a National Child Protection Act. President Clinton signed the "Oprah Bill" into law in 1993, establishing the national database she had sought, which is now available to law enforcement agencies and concerned parties across the country. Oprah's show also continued to attract the top names in the entertainment industry; a 1993 interview with the reclusive entertainer Michael Jackson drew a hundred million viewers, making it the most watched interview in television history. Oprah Winfrey was named one of the "100 Most Influential People of the 20th Century" by Time magazine, and in 1998 received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Despite her complete dominance of the daytime talk show field, Oprah Winfrey had not given up her acting ambitions. In 1998, she produced and starred in the feature film Beloved, adapted from the book by the Nobel Prize-winning American author Toni Morrison. Winfrey has long used her television program to champion the works of authors she admires, including Morrison, and her longtime friend Maya Angelou. Her influence over the publishing industry exploded when she began her on-air book club in 1996. "Oprah Book Club" selections became instant bestsellers, and in 1999 Winfrey received the National Book Foundation's 50th anniversary gold medal for her service to books and authors. She herself has authored five books. A proposed book on weight loss, to be co-written with her personal trainer, has received a publisher's advance fee reported to be the highest in history.
Oprah Winfrey's business interests have extended well beyond her own production company. She is one of the partners in Oxygen Media, Inc., a cable channel and interactive network presenting programming designed primarily for women. With her success, she has also become one of the world's most generous philanthropists. In 2000, Oprah's Angel Network began presenting a $100,000 "Use Your Life Award" to people who are using their own lives to improve the lives of others. She now publishes two magazines, O, The Oprah Magazine, and O at Home. The launch of her first magazine was the most successful start-up in the history of the industry. When Forbes published its list of America's billionaires for the year 2003, it disclosed that Oprah Winfrey was the first African-American woman to become a billionaire. The Oprah Winfrey Show remained as popular as ever, airing in 140 countries around the world. Many of her regular guests, including Dr. Phil McGraw and Dr. Mehmet Oz, have gone on to shows of their own, produced by Oprah's Harpo Productions. Over the years, she has also used her program to promote the many philanthropic ventures she supports. After filming a Christmas program in South Africa, she established the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls, near Johannesburg. Her legendary generosity has extended not only to her favorite charities, but to her loyal viewers. She celebrated the beginning of her 20th season on national television by giving every member of the studio audience a brand new Pontiac automobile.
Two decades after she first established herself as a national presence, Oprah Winfrey was still devoting much of her prodigious energy to film and television production. In 2005, she produced a film adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston's novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, with a screenplay by Suzan-Lori Parks. The same year, she produced a successful Broadway musical version of The Color Purple. As an actress, she has been heard in a number of successful animated films, including Charlotte's Web, Bee Movie and The Princess and the Frog.
Oprah Winfrey makes her principal home on a 42-acre ocean-view estate in Montecito, California, just south of Santa Barbara, but also owns homes in another six states and the island of Antigua. The business press measures her wealth in numerous superlatives: the highest-paid performer on television, the richest self-made woman in America, and the richest African-American of the 20th century. More difficult to calculate is her profound influence over the way people around the world read, eat, exercise, feel and think about themselves and the world around them. She appears on every list of the world's leading opinion-makers, and has been rightly called "the most powerful woman in the world."
JE KISA CHA OPRAH CHAWEZA BADILI MTIZAMO WAKO?
FUATILIA MAHOJIANO YA MZEE DESMOND TUTU PIA
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My father was a schoolmaster, and I remember waking up one evening late, and seeing the room in which I was sleeping filled to the brim, as it were, with musical instruments -- drums and kettle drums and trumpets -- because they had a troop of Pathfinders -- something like Boy Scouts -- and it was just wonderful waking up and having all of this in front of you! And then, I often accompanied my father. I really liked riding with him on his bicycle on Saturdays. He was very fond of fishing. I don't think I liked fishing. I mean, you had to sit quietly and still, but I enjoyed the ride. And it was fun, it was fun. I mean, as I say, you didn't go around lugging a deep sense of resentment. We knew, yes, we were deprived. It wasn't the same thing for white kids, but it was as full a life as you could make it. I mean, we made toys for ourselves with wires, making cars, and you really were exploding with joy! |
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Desmond Tutu InterviewNobel Prize for Peace
June 12, 2004
Chicago, Illinois | Print Interview |
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When you were a boy in Klerksdorp, what was your childhood like, and what experiences had a large influence on you? Archbishop Desmond Tutu: My childhood in Klerksdorp? Well, like any other black child, we lived in a ghetto, and yet, it wasn't as if you went around feeling sorry for yourself.
And it really was fun. I mean, my parents -- my father was a school master and principal of the primary school/elementary school in which I started. My mother was not very educated but it was great fun. I mean, you know, I had two -- still have two sisters. My brothers died in infancy so I was the only boy in the family and to some extent perhaps a little bit spoiled. Was there any book that you read growing up that had the most effect on you? Archbishop Desmond Tutu: But one of the things that my father did was to let me read comics. Now people used to say that's bad because it isn't -- it spoils your English but, in fact, letting me read -- I devoured all kinds of comics -- fed my love for English and my love for reading but I suppose if he had been firm I might not have developed this deep love for reading and for English, which stood me in good stead when I later went into hospital for 20 months. I did have something to do. I had -- as things maybe got a little bit more serious, I was given a diet -- we didn't have too many books but my father was keen that one read things like Aesop's Fables and Lamb's, Tales from Shakespeare. I didn't read the originals but I read these stories that describe what Shakespeare was saying in the plays and that possibly was something that sharpened your appetite for later. I read -- that would have been some of the things that I did. And then he had books that seemed to be like encyclopedia and it was fun just paging through. I recall just one occasion in class in this elementary school our teacher asking whether any one of us knew what they called those things in Holland for stopping the water. And it had just happened that I had been looking through these several books that my father had and it looked like I was really smart because I put up my hand and I said, "Dikes." And the teacher didn't know what to do. I mean, he was looking for something to -- I mean, he really wanted to put me on a pedestal for having been able to know this particular thing but, yeah, I really enjoyed and had fun.
Was there one teacher in particular you remember? Archbishop Desmond Tutu: Ultimately, it's a man who was teaching us English Literature in what we call matricula, the last 2 years of high school. He really was quite extraordinary. When he spoke of a Shakespearean play, you almost thought that he grew up with Shakespeare! He was very good, yes. A black guy who was fantastic and gave us a deep love for literature. Do you remember his name? Archbishop Desmond Tutu: Yes. Geoff Mamabulu. He died. Geoff Mamabulu. He was fantastic, fantastic. But I had other teachers. If you gave me five opportunities, I would give you five good teachers who were incredible. I mean good teachers, you know, people who were dedicated despite the fact that -- yeah, we lived a segregated life and when you went to town where the whites lived you saw their schools much, much, much better in equipment, better grounds.
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And even more extraordinary -- see, I used to -- my father bought me a bicycle and I was about the only kid in the ghetto who had a bicycle and he would send me into town. And, frequently I would see black kids scavenging in the dust bins of the schools where they picked out perfectly okay apples and fruit. White kids were being provided with school feeding, government school feeding, but most of the time they didn't eat it. They preferred what their mommies gave them and so they would dump the whole fruit into the dust bin and these kids coming from a township who needed free meals didn't get them. And so they got -- it was things that registered without your being aware that they were registering and you're saying there are these extraordinary inconsistencies in our lives. |
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But you see I grew up in a town called Ventersdorp and today -- well, Ventersdorp became notorious because it's the town where somebody called Eugène Terre'Blanche, who headed up the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging, AWB, Afrikaans Resistance Movement. A Neo Nazi group. Well, that was also his headquarters and I frequently said, "Well, you know, if South Africa can survive DTs and ET, it can survive anything." But this town that had -- yeah, I mean, it was racist to the extent that, you know, I mean all of South Africa was racist. blacks lived in ghetto townships called "Locations" and the whites in the white area. Although actually very strangely they allowed Indians even in Ventesdorp. Indians could live in the white residential area but they went to school with us.
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But what I was trying to say is human beings are odd. I would go to town in part to go and buy newspapers for my father and, before taking them home, I would spread them on the sidewalk, the pavement, and I would kneel to read. Now this is a racist town. I can't ever recall any day when what should have happened, in fact, did happen, which is that a white person would walk across the face of the newspaper. I can't -- I mean, I still am puzzled that they used to walk around this newspaper with this black kid kneeling down there reading when you would have expected that they would have made my life somewhat uncomfortable. I mean, I cannot understand that particular inconsistency. It is, therefore, one of my memories that why in the name of everything that is good didn't those whites actually just be nasty, and they weren't. |
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What kind of student were you as a kid? Archbishop Desmond Tutu: I was okay. I think I was okay.
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Some people might have thought that I was perhaps, not totally unintelligent, but I give a lot of credit to our teachers because although our schools had very deficient equipment that we didn't have many of the things that you would have expected in a school. We had very -- many of the people who taught us were very dedicated and they inspired you to want to emulate them and really to become all that you could become. They gave you the impression that, in fact, yeah, the sky is the limit. You can, even with all of the obstacles that are placed in your way; you can reach out to the stars. I mean, when I went to high school our school did not have enough classrooms to accommodate all the students and so many of us, especially in -- well, what we call from one, the first year of high school, we used to meet in church buildings and it used to be just one big hall where they accommodated four classes. So, you had to have a teacher who was engrossing because you could hear what the teacher in the other class was saying and if that was more interesting your teacher really had his job cut out to keep your attention, and we didn't have desks. We sat on benches that were used on Sundays as the pews for the church and you sat when the teacher was holding forth and then when you wrote you knelt behind the bench and where you had been sitting was now your desk top so we used to write on those. |
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But again, you know, it's -- maybe we were not as politically conscious as kids became although I don't think that is entirely true because we were glad when the Nazis were defeated. I went to high school in 1945 and we celebrated VE day. It was just wonderful.
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We were wonderfully encouraged by what blacks were achieving in the United States. I recall when I was about nine picking up a tattered copy of Ebony magazine and I think -- I mean, maybe journalists ought to know just how much power they actually have because here I was 10,000 miles away from America with this copy of Ebony magazine and it was describing the exploits of Jackie Robinson and how he broke into major league baseball. Now I didn't know baseball from ping pong but what was so important for me, what made me grow inches was to know that a black guy had triumphed over all of the obstacles that were placed in his way and there he was now playing for something called Brooklyn Dodgers. Now I didn't know Brooklyn Dodgers. I didn't know Jackie, but it helped to exorcise what is the most awful consequence of racial injustice and it is the sense -- this demon of self-hate when you have a very low self-esteem. |
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And I recall the many deaths we died when say Joe Louis, the Brown Bomber, fighting Billy Conn (1941) and losing or nearly losing. We would weep for those losses and when he triumphed somehow it was our victory. He was a kind of surrogate for us over there. Yes, we were being clobbered here but that didn't matter, that is how it should be. It was possible as he had indicated and others.
I recall, too -- it may not have been a very good film, Stormy Weather. I don't know -- I mean, whether you realize my pedigree vintage from the fact that Stormy Weather was a hit movie in the townships largely, of course, because the cast was all black and when I met Lena Horne later in life I told her, "Oh, I fell in love with you when I was about nine years of age." The Fats Waller and the Ink Spots and all that kind of thing, you know, those were things that helped us to know that -- how a racist society defined us was not the truth about us. And, again, you see, I mean we didn't sit down and sort of work this out rationally consciously. It was things that as we were taking in unaware that you were in but that they helped you eventually one day in the struggle that you were going to make against the awfulness of Apartheid. The recognition that not all white people, in fact, were the same. I mean, even that thing that these Afrikaans in Fantastop didn't walk over my paper but walked around the paper maybe contributed to when one later on was in the struggle against racist Apartheid remembering the essential humanity of people. When you were a kid, what did you want to do? What did you want to be when you grew up? Archbishop Desmond Tutu: I know that for a very long time my consuming passion, which was confirmed when I contracted TB -- I had TB when I was about 12 or so -- was I wanted to be a physician and when I got TB I was even more determined. I want to be physician so that I can find a cure for the scourge. And, in fact, I was admitted to medical school. If we had had the funds maybe today I would have been a physician. As it turned out, I was not able to take up my place at medical school and instead went to Teacher Training College because the government was giving scholarships for people who wanted to become teachers. I became a teacher and I haven't regretted that. I mean, it has just been wonderful because I thought back to my own teachers and what they had meant for me. And really trying to get kids who in so many other aspects of life were being told that they didn't really count to get them to know that they really could become outstanding whatever they wanted within reason because in South Africa there were things that were outside the range for blacks -- that were put outside the range for blacks by, I mean, deliberate decision.
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I went back to teach at my alma mater, the high school where I'd done my own high school education and you were shaken by the conditions under which our kids were having to learn. I was teaching English and to think, I mean, that we had classes -- this was average -- of 80 students in a class and especially with language work you had to give kids a great deal of exercises, marking all of those 80. And, maybe you taught not just one class, you taught -- I taught one, two, three, four classes. Two of which were about 80 each and the other two about 40 each, but that was sort of virtually par for the course. And, you complain -- to whom would you complain because the government's position was that these natives are a nuisance and the least you can do for them, the least you can get away with the better, but you would have thought we were already the pits in many ways. Our educational system was the pits. It was just the sheer determination of the people who -- well, the parents, many of the parents uneducated but they were slogging like nobody's business to give their kids the little education that they could get because they felt it gave them a chance to lead a reasonably better life, slightly better than their own parents. |
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I remember that one of the people who became a leading novelist in South Africa, Askim Patheli, he had at one time been a teacher, a high school teacher, and then couldn't take government policy. And you know he went and worked as a clerk at a blind -- at a school for blind blacks and he was a driver/clerk. I met up with him because my mother was a cook in the same institution and now here was this guy, he could have sort of disintegrated but despite doing what was a very lonely job he went on to study and by correspondence, distance learning he put in a master's thesis and was the first person -- not the first black -- he was the first person at the university, the University of South Africa, to get a master's in English with distinction, you know. And so you had wonderful role models and they were some of the things that subverted the ghastliness of our situation.
And so I -- yeah, I tried to be what my teachers had been to me to these kids seeking to instill in them a pride, a pride in themselves. A pride in what they were doing. A pride that said they may define you as so and so. You aren't that. Make sure you prove them wrong by becoming what the potential in you says you can become. And so I taught for four years and it was fun. It was fun. I mean, it was fun when you got -- I taught English and History and it was fun when you got kids beginning to see the interconnectedness of things.
Desmond Tutu Interview, has it challenged your thinking about life achievements? go ahead and make the difference. |
KISA NA MAISHA YA BEN CARSON KATIKA MAHOJIANO
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(Dr. Benjamin S. Carson was first interviewed by the Academy of Achievement on June 29, 1996 in Sun Valley, Idaho, and again on June 7, 2002 in Dublin, Ireland. The following transcript draws on both interviews.) People often speak of brain surgery as the epitome of something difficult and hard to achieve. When did you first have a notion that you actually wanted to do this?
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Benjamin Carson: Medicine has always been the only career that I considered, but the aspect of medicine changed. It went from missionary doctor to psychiatrist and then I toyed for a while with the idea of being a cardiovascular surgeon. But, as I began in medical school -- toward the end of my first year -- to realize that I really didn't want to do psychiatry, and I felt that although cardiothoracic surgery was challenging, that it didn't offer me enough variety of cases. And then I said, "Well, what's an area where you could become an authority very quickly?" and I said, "The brain, because nobody knows anything about the brain." And, I spent all those years thinking I was going to be a psychiatrist. So, I already knew quite a lot about the brain. So, it was toward the end of my first year in medical school that I decided that neurosurgery was going to be the right field for me. |
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You say you never really considered anything other than medicine. You must have been a very serious student, to get into medical school.
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Benjamin Carson: I was not a serious student at all. In fact, I was a horrible student. But, you know, like many students, I kind of envisioned myself as a doctor anyway, despite the fact that I wasn't doing well. I can remember we used to sit in the hallways at Detroit City Hospital or Boston City Hospital for hours and hours because we were on medical assistance, which meant we had to wait until one of the interns or residents was free to see us, and I didn't mind at all because I was in the hospital. And, I was listening to the PA system. "Dr. Jones, Dr. Jones to the emergency room," just sounded so fabulous. And I would be saying, "They're going to be saying 'Dr. Carson' one day." But, of course we have beepers now. But nevertheless, it was just wonderful to have that dream and to imagine myself in that setting. |
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It was perhaps unrealistic, because...
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We lived in the inner city, single parent home, dire poverty, my mother only had a third grade education. I was perhaps the worst student you've ever seen. I thought I was really stupid. All my classmates and teachers agreed, and my nickname was "Dummy." But, fortunately I continued to hold onto that dream and, you know, when I was in the fifth grade, my mother put us on this reading program and said we had to read two books a piece from the Detroit Public Library and submit to her written book reports, which she couldn't read, but we didn't know that, and she'd put a little check mark on them and act like she was reading them. |
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So she actually could not read. Benjamin Carson: She couldn't read, no. She only had a third grade education, but she was horrified when she saw my report card at mid-term in the fifth grade. I was failing almost every subject. She knew what a difficult life she had, having only a third grade education, trying to raise two young sons in the inner city, with no resources. She saw me heading down the same path, and my brother as well. She just didn't know what to do. She prayed for wisdom and came up with this idea of turning off the television set and letting us watch only two to three pre-selected TV programs during the week. I was considerably less than enthusiastic about this program, as you might imagine.
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We had to stay in the house and read these books and our friends were outside and they were playing and they knew we couldn't come out. It seems like they would be making just that much more noise to torment us. But, I hated it for the first several weeks, but then all of a sudden, I started to enjoy it because we had no money, but between the covers of those books, I could go anyplace, I could be anybody, I could do anything. And, I began to learn how to use my imagination more because it doesn't really require a lot of imagination to watch television, but it does to read. You've got to take those letters and make them into words, and those words into sentences, and those sentences into concepts, and the more you do that, the more vivid your imagination becomes. And, I believe that's probably one of the reasons that you see that creative people tend to be readers, because they're exercising their mind. |
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A lot of people say, "I can learn everything I need to know. I can watch this video or I can watch this DVD," or what have you, but that's like saying you can develop your muscles by watching somebody else lift weights. You have to actually exercise your mind in order to get it to be active and to get it to be creative and reading is a tremendous way to do that.
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I was reading about people in laboratories, pouring chemicals from a beaker into a flask and watching the steam rise, and completing electrical circuits, and discovering galaxies, and looking at microcosms in the microscope, and I just acquired so much knowledge, and I had put myself into those settings and I saw myself differently than everybody else in my environment who just wanted to get out of school so they could get some cool clothes and a cool car. And, I was looking down the pike and seeing myself as a scientist or a physician or something of that nature, and that was one of the things that sort of carried me through much of the ridicule and some of the hardships that a person would have to go through coming from my environment and going to medical school. |
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Benjamin Carson Interview, has it challenged you in anyway, take action! |
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