Word: hosts
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...talk-show host as budding entertainment mogul. Following her Oscar- nominated role in The Color Purple, Oprah formed a production company, Harpo Inc. (Oprah spelled backward), to develop TV and movie projects. Its first co- production, The Women of Brewster Place, a drama based on Gloria Naylor's novel in which Oprah plays one of seven ghetto women, is scheduled to air on ABC this season. The company has also bought the rights to Beloved, Toni Morrison's Pulitzer-prizewinning novel about slavery (Oprah wants to play the lead role), and has even approached some of Oprah's talk-show...
...botched attempt at a permanent caused all her hair to fall out temporarily. More important, her inexperience led to her being dumped as anchorwoman. "I was 22 years old," she says. "I had no business anchoring the news in a major market." She was given another chance, as co-host of a morning talk show, and instantly found her niche. "I said to myself, 'This is what I should be doing. It's like breathing...
Oprah breathed new life into the ratings and repeated the trick seven years later, when she became host of WLS's struggling AM Chicago show. The program, which went national in September 1986, has won a huge following by focusing -- unduly, say some critics -- on the often bizarre nooks and crannies of human misfortune. "There is a commonality in human experience," Oprah contends. "If it's happened to one person, it has happened to thousands of others. Our shows are hour-long life lessons...
Oprah's charmed career has not been without a few snags. Her second film, Native Son, based on Richard Wright's novel, was a flop at the box office, and a prospective sitcom for ABC, starring Oprah as a talk-show host, was scuttled after a mediocre pilot. Most of her attention is now focused on bringing to the screen projects that are close to her -- like Beloved and Kaffir Boy, an autobiography set in South Africa. "I want to do movies that are about something, that move people and leave them feeling uplifted." Though most of them involve black...
Critics promptly blasted the report for failing to break any new ground and complained that it did not address the need for nutrition education programs or tough regulations governing food labeling. Still, the document was welcomed as reinforcement for a host of warnings and advisories issued earlier by federal agencies, including the Department of Agriculture and the National Cancer Institute, and such organizations as the American Heart Association and the American Cancer Society...