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Oprah Gail Winfrey was born on January 29, 1954 in Kosciusko, Mississippi.  She is an American talk show host and actress.  

She grew up in a dysfunctional home but still managed to be an excellent student and skipped 2 grades. She was eventually awarded a full scholarship to Tennessee State University where she studied communications.  Her first exposure to media came when she was 17 and working at a local radio station. It was in local media where she became both the youngest news anchor and the first black female news anchor at a Nashville TV station.  

In 1983 she relocated to Chicago to host a half hour morning talk show called AM Chicago. It took only a few months for the initially low rated talk show to jump to the highest rated talk show in Chicago over the Donahue show.  The show was renamed the Oprah Winfrey Show and she soon had a national audience and was the number one talk show in the country. Around the mid 90’s she began to adopt a much less tabloid oriented show and began to focus on important women’s issues and current events.  

Winfrey has also had a part time film career on the go and has been critically acclaimed numerous times. She was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress award for her performance in 1985’s The Color Purple.   

She is also very generous and donates more of her own money to charity than any other person in show business.  

She is one of the wealthiest women in the world and her influence reaches across many different planes including literature, politics, arts, and many more. 

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