Oprah is a internationally known TV presence known for her hit TV talkshow, her magazines and her book club. Oprah may seem as if she climbed to the top fairly easily but her journey was actually one of the most treacherous climbs in TV history.
Born in Mississippi but moved to Nashville to begin to launch her career. She began to work for a talk show called “people are talking.” Which she stayed with for 8 years.
After this talk show, Oprah was soon recruited to work for a show in Chicago which became known as the Oprah Winfrey show where Oprah would stay for 25 long seasons and mold her claim to fame.
Success and Fame
In 1994, with talk shows becoming increasingly trashy and exploitative, Winfrey pledged to keep her show free of tabloid topics. Although ratings initially fell, she earned the respect of her viewers and was soon rewarded with an upsurge in popularity. Her projects with Harpo have included the highly rated 1989 TV miniseries, The Women of Brewster Place, which she also starred in. Winfrey also signed a multi-picture contract with Disney.
The initial project, 1998’s Beloved, based on Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Toni Morrison and starring Winfrey and Danny Glover, got mixed reviews and generally failed to live up to expectations.
Winfrey, who became almost as well-known for her weight loss efforts as for her talk show, lost an estimated 90 pounds (dropping to her ideal weight of around 150 pounds) and competed in the Marine Corps Marathon in Washington, D.C., in 1995. In the wake of her highly publicized success, Winfrey’s personal chef, Rosie Daley, and trainer, Bob Greene, both published best-selling books.
Her network
The popularity of Winfrey’s show skyrocketed after the success of The Color Purple, and in September 1985 the distributor King World bought the syndication rights (the rights to distribute a television program) to air the program in one hundred thirty-eight cities, a record for first-time syndication. That year, although Donahue was being aired on two hundred stations, Winfrey won her time slot by 31 percent, drew twice the Chicago audience as Donahue, and carried the top ten markets in the United States.
Oprah’s renowned network is definitely her best level of success. The network displays every once and character of her guru-like persona.
Oprah’s difficult past has led her to becoming the most generous woman in the world. “You get a car, you get a car, you get a car!” Is the most infamous line of great generosity in the world.
Oprah’s genuine character is sure to trump any other media heads because she isn’t transparent like the rest of them.
I guess to sum it up we can say that Oprah’s claim to power is her genuine attitude in the media that is absent in most other talk show hosts that we consume everyday.
Her encouragement and need to make the world a better place should be an inspiration to celebrities across the globe.
Learn more about Oprah Winfrey from the video below!
