Word: oprah
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...stream has not always been smooth. Born in Mississippi, Oprah (her name is an accidental misspelling of the Biblical character Orpah) shuttled for much of her childhood between her grandmother in Mississippi, her mother in Milwaukee and her father in Nashville. The time with her mother was the most traumatic: she suffered several instances of sexual abuse, the first at age nine by a 19-year-old cousin. Oprah revealed the incident in a now legendary segment of her talk show; today she says the abuse was "not a horrible thing in my life. There was a lesson...
...however, help turn her into a rebellious and promiscuous teen. She was straightened out by her father, a strict disciplinarian who forced her to read books and memorize 20 new vocabulary words a week. The two are still "close in spirit," Oprah says, though they talk only once every couple of months. "We weren't a family with lots of hugs and touching," Oprah recalls. "Nobody ever said, 'I love you.' " Her father, still a barber and city councilman in Nashville, has turned down Oprah's offers to "retire him" (though she does support her mother financially). "The only thing...
...bright and attractive teenager (she was Miss Black Tennessee of 1971), Oprah began her TV career as a reporter and anchor for the CBS affiliate in Nashville while she was still a student at Tennessee State. Later, at Baltimore's WJZ-TV, the TV imagemakers went to work. A 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...
...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...
Playing the role of Sofia in Steven Spielberg's 1985 film The Color Purple was a life lesson of its own. Oprah landed the part by a stroke of harmonic convergence. She read Alice Walker's novel, gave copies to friends and said she felt destined to appear in a movie version. When the film's co-producer, Quincy Jones, turned up in Chicago to testify in a lawsuit, he saw Oprah's show and arranged an audition. Oprah regarded the entire experience with near mystical awe. "It was a spiritual evolvement for me," she says. "I learned to love...