Oprah Winfrey is an Emmy Award–winning talk show host, media executive, Academy Award–nominated actress, and philanthropist. She is best known for her talk show, The Oprah Winfrey Show, broadcast from Chicago, which ran in national syndication for 25 years, from 1986 to 2011. Alone and homeless at fourteen, she found her father Vernon in Nashville and found a home again. He gave Oprah the structure and home life she needed. “As strict as he was,” she says, “he had concerns about me making the best of my life and would not accept anything he thought was less than my best.” She was smart and she was beautiful. At 17, she won a beauty contest in Nashville, an on-air job with an African American radio station, and a scholarship from Tennessee State University, where she majored in Speech Communications and Performing Arts. At 19, she became the first female African American news anchor in Nashville. She joined WJZ-TV News in Baltimore as co-anchor, where she also co-hosted her first talk show, People Are Talking. Oprah knew how to listen. But, for all her success, few could have expected that when she moved to Chicago in 1984 to host Channel 7’s A.M. Chicago that she would redefine the talk show format and change television forever. The show was renamed The Oprah Winfrey Show, and the rest is history. Still, that history was far from finished. Even as America fell in love with this straightforward, unassuming lady, Steven Spielberg watched some tapes of
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