Oprah Winfrey                                                                                   (Photo/wiki)

Oprah Gail Winfrey is an American media personality, Academy Award nominated actress, producer, literary critic and magazine publisher.

Oprah is best known for her self-titled, multi-award winning talk show, which has become the highest-rated program of its kind in history.  She has been ranked the richest African American of the 20th century.

Winfrey was born into poverty in rural Mississippi Kosciusko, Mississippi) to a teenage single mother and later raised in an inner-city Milwaukee neighborhood.   While living with the man she calls her father, a barber in Tennessee, Winfrey landed a job in radio while still in high school and began co-anchoring the local evening news at the age of 19.

Her emotional ad-lib delivery eventually got her transferred to the daytime talk show arena, and after boosting a third-rated local Chicago talk show to first place, she launched her own production company and became internationally syndicated.

By the mid 1990s Oprah had reinvented her show with a focus on literature, self-improvement, and spirituality. 

In 1985, Winfrey co-starred in Steven Spielberg's epic film adaptation of Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Color Purple. She earned immediate acclaim as Sofia, the distraught housewife. The following year Winfrey was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, but she lost to Anjelica Huston. The Color Purple went on to become a Broadway musical and opened late 2005, with Winfrey credited as a producer.

In October 1998, Winfrey produced and starred in the film Beloved, based upon Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize winning novel of the same name. To prepare for her role as Sethe, the protagonist and former slave, Winfrey experienced a 24-hour simulation of the experience of slavery, which included being tied up and blindfolded and left alone in the woods.

Beloved Co-star Thandie Newton said of Oprah,

Here we were working on this project with the heavy underbelly of political and social realism, and she managed to lighten things up. I've worked with a lot of good actors, and I know Oprah hasn't made many films. I was stunned. She's a very strong technical actress and it's because she's so smart. She's acute. She's got a mind like a razor blade."

In 2005, Harpo Productions released another film adaptation of a famous American novel, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). The made-for-television film Their Eyes Were Watching God was based upon a teleplay by Suzan-Lori Parks, and starred Halle Berry in the lead female role.

Winfrey has voiced for Charlotte's Web, the 2006 film as Gussie the goose. She is also the voice of Judge Bumbleden in Bee Movie (2007) co-starring the voices of Jerry Seinfeld and Renee Zellweger.

In late 2008, Winfrey's company Harpo Films signed an exclusive output pact with HBO.

In 2009, Winfrey will provide the voice for the character of Eudora, the mother of Princess Tiana, in Disney's The Princess and the Frog.  And not that a frog is a pet, well maybe to some it is, but Oprah stands strongly on finding a pet through a shelter.  She uses PAWS Chicago.  And her pets will even be so lucky as to receive an inheritance!