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More Oprah Winfrey Bios & Profiles

 

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Biography #2

Oprah Winfrey earned both Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for her feature film acting debut in Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple.

The celebrated talk-show host, actress, producer, philanthropist, and businesswoman is the chairman of Harpo Entertainment Group in Chicago. Through Harpo Productions, she produces and hosts The Oprah Winfrey Show, the highest-rated talk show in television history. Since entering syndication in 1986, The Oprah Winfrey Show has remained the number-one talk show for 12 consecutive seasons, receiving 32 Emmys -- seven of which went to the host. At the end of the 1995/96 television season, Oprah was honored with the most prestigious award in broadcasting, the George Foster Peabody Individual Achievement Award. In June 1998, she was named one of the 100 most influential people of the Twentieth Century by Time. More recently, Oprah was named Most Important Person in Books and Media by Newsweek magazine, and in May of 1998 received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Oprah began her career in broadcasting at age 19, when she became both the youngest news anchor and the first African-American woman news anchor at Nashville's WTVF-TV. She then moved to Baltimore to co-anchor the six o'clock news, until she was recruited to cohost Baltimore's WJZ-TV's local talk show, People Are Talking.

Seven years later, she relocated to Chicago to host WLS-TV's morning talk show, AM Chicago, which became the number-one talk show one month after Oprah took over. In less than a year, the show expanded to an hour and was renamed The Oprah Winfrey Show.

In addition to her acting debut in The Color Purple, Oprah was lauded by critics for her performances in There Are No Children Here and The Women of Brewster Place, two acclaimed television projects produced by Harpo Films.

Under the Harpo Films banner, Oprah is the executive producer, with Kate Forte, of the Oprah Winfrey franchise Oprah Winfrey Presents, a collection of original television television films for ABC. The first production, Before Women Had Wings, starring Ellen Barkin, Tina Majorino, and Oprah Winfrey, debuted last fall. An adaptation of Dorothy West's The Wedding aired earlier this year.

Visit Oprah.com for more about Oprah.

updated 28-Aug-2002