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Oprah Winfrey: South Africa
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Oprah Winfrey is the host of the most watched daytime show on television in America. She is the first African-American to start her own TV studio. The multitalented Oprah is ... a millionaire businesswoman, a talented actress, owner of a movie production company, and a committed philanthropist.
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Oprah Winfrey's public speaking career began in 1957. At three, she was speaking in church, by her teens she was touring the churches of Nashville, reciting the sermons of James Weldon Johnson. Other children sang, Oprah talked. And she's still talking -- but to much larger audiences. The path that led from her grandmother's farm in Kosciusko, Mississippi to becoming the first African-American woman billionaire is a story of unwavering focus and unrelenting determination.
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Born in rural poverty, then raised by a mother on welfare in the ghetto, Winfrey became a millionaire at age 32 when her talk show went national. Because of the amount of revenue the show generated, Winfrey was in a position to negotiate ownership of the show and start her own production company. By 1994 the show's ratings were still thriving and Winfrey negotiated a contract that earned her nine figures a year. Considered the richest woman in entertainment by the early 1990s, at age 41 Winfrey's wealth crossed another milestone when with a net worth of $340 million, she replaced Bill Cosby as the only African American on the Forbes 400. Although blacks are 12% of the U.S. population, Winfrey has remained the only black person wealthy enough to rank among America's 400 richest people nearly every year since 1995. (Black Entertainment Television founder Bob Johnson briefly joined her on the list from 2001-2003 before his ex-wife reportedly acquired part of his fortune, though he returned in 2006.)[46]
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In addition to her work on her long-running talk show, Winfrey appeared in several motion pictures. The most prominent were adapted from well-known novels by African American writers. Winfrey’s role as Sofia in The Color Purple (1985; adapted from the book by Alice Walker) won her a 1986 Academy Award nomination as best supporting actress. She ... appeared in Native Son (1986; from the book by Richard Wright) and produced and costarred in the television miniseries The Women of Brewster Place (1989; from the book by Gloria Naylor). In 1998 Harpo Films, a division of Harpo Productions, produced the film Beloved, which was based on the novel by Toni Morrison and directed by Jonathan Demme. Winfrey appeared in the film as Sethe.
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During her freshman year at Tennessee State, Winfrey became Miss Black Nashville and Miss Tennessee. The Nashville CBS affiliate offered her a job; Winfrey turned it down twice, but finally took the advice of a speech teacher, who reminded her that job offers from CBS were "the reason people go to college." Now seen each evening on WTVFTV, Winfrey was Nashville's first African American female co-anchor of the evening news. She was 19 years old and still a sophomore in college.
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Despite her ability to cross racial lines, Oprah still feels a deep connection to African American society, as anyone would guess. Also, the majority of her audiences remain to be women and African Americans. People have praised her as "a role model for black youth"(7) and a leader of American women. Her connection to black society can be seen in many realms. Oprah has focused her theatrical career on movies and TV series based on the growth and lives of African Americans. The most blatant examples of this are her roles in The Color Purple and Beloved.
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