"I don't think of myself as a poor deprived ghetto girl who made good. I think of myself as somebody who from an early age knew I was responsible for myself, and I had to make good."

Born on January 29, 1954, in Kosciusko, Mississippi, Oprah Winfrey hosts television's highest-rated syndicated talk show. She is also an actress and businesswoman.

In January, 1984, Oprah Winfrey left her job as co-host of a popular Baltimore talk show and signed on with Chicago's faltering morning program, "A.M. Chicago." A long-time loser in its time slot, "A.M. Chicago" experienced a swift change under the direction of its new host, who scrapped the tired old format with its cooking and make-up tips and replaced it with a dynamic new approach that highlighted more topical and controversial subject matter. Then there was Winfrey herself; as Joan Barthel noted in Ms., "Oprah did not so much host the show as immerse herself in it, with a style that blended earthiness, humor, spontaneity, and candor, with a unique personal touch."

Only one month after the debut of the new "A.M. Chicago," Winfrey pulled even in the ratings with fellow Chicagoan Phil Donahue and his nationally syndicated talk show, a perennial ratings powerhouse. After three months, she surpassed "Donahue." A year and a half later, "A.M. Chicago" was no more; expanded to an hour, it became "The Oprah Winfrey Show." In September, 1986, the program went into syndication in more than 130 cities across the country (making it the first talk show hosted by a Black-American woman to do so) and quickly dominated the airwaves. Since then, Winfrey has become one of the richest and most powerful women in the entertainment industry, a veritable one-person "media mini-empire"--a truly remarkable achievement for a former teenage runaway who was nearly sent to a juvenile detention center for her rebellious behavior.

Born on a farm in Mississippi, Oprah Gail Winfrey is the daughter of Vernita Lee and Vernon Winfrey. Her unmarried parents drifted apart and moved elsewhere not long after she was born, leaving her in the care of her maternal grandmother, whom Winfrey credits with fostering her outgoing personality and precociousness. She was reading by the age of two and a half and giving little speeches in church by the age of three, a favorite activity throughout her childhood. "I was a champion speaker," she once recalled. "I spoke for every women's group, banquet, church function--I did the circuit. Anybody needed anybody to speak anything, they'd call me."

At the age of six, Winfrey went to Milwaukee to live with her mother, who was working as a maid. Adjusting to an urban ghetto after enjoying the quiet peace of a Mississippi farm proved extremely difficult for the little girl. Making matters worse was the fact that her mother, preoccupied with her own problems, paid scant attention to her. This lack of supervision enabled several different men--among them a cousin and her mother's boyfriend--to abuse her sexually. (Years later, during a show she was doing on incest, Winfrey burst into tears and shared with her audience the story of her own ordeal.) Confused, ashamed, guilt-ridden, and afraid to tell anyone what was being done to her, Winfrey began to "act out, looking for love in all the wrong places," as she later explained. Her increasing belligerence and delinquency, which included running away from home, slowly drove her mother to distraction, and at last Vernita Lee gave her daughter a choice: she could either go live with her father and stepmother or be sent to a juvenile detention center. Winfrey opted to move in with her father, a barber and city councilman in Nashville, Tennessee.

As Marcia Ann Gillespie observed in Ms., "living with her father ... gave the vulnerable child protection and security, the wild child structure and discipline, and both a father who reaffirmed her grandmother's early teachings and belief in excellence and pride." Vernon Winfrey "turned my life around by insisting that I be more than I was and by believing I could be more," his daughter declared in a Good Housekeeping interview with Alan Ebert. "His love of learning showed me the way." In Nashville, Winfrey became an honor student and rediscovered her flair for public speaking, emerging as a standout performer in oratory and debate. (She was even hired to do radio newscasts for a local station during the last few months of her senior year in high school.) Her skills earned her a scholarship to Tennessee State University, where she majored in speech and drama and won "Miss Black Nashville" and "Miss Black Tennessee" pageants by virtue of what she says was her poise and talent rather than her looks. "I was raised to believe that the lighter your skin, the better you were," Winfrey told Barthel. "I wasn't light-skinned, so I decided to be the best and the smartest."

At nineteen, while she was still in college, Winfrey accepted a position as Nashville's first Black-American woman anchor on the evening news. She remained there until she graduated in 1976. She then took a job as a reporter and evening news co-anchor for a Baltimore television station, where her boss, critical of her looks, urged her to get a complete makeover. A too-strong permanent solution at one beauty salon she visited left her temporarily bald and shattered her self-esteem, resulting in a deep depression. Winfrey says she turned to food to help ease this depression. Although this eventually created the much-publicized weight problem that still plagues her today, the experience also convinced her of the need to "live my own life, to always be myself."

Winfrey stayed with the Baltimore station for eight years, relinquishing her evening anchor duties in 1977 to co-host the "People are Talking" morning show. There she found her niche, displaying her uncommon ability to connect intellectually and emotionally with a wide variety of people and topics. She held that position until 1984, when her producer sent an audition tape to Chicago's WLS-TV. Impressed by Winfrey 's talent and the ratings she generated, the station manager hired her away from Baltimore and brought her to Chicago, where she began a meteoric rise to the top of her profession.

Throughout its run, "The Oprah Winfrey Show" has touched on a wide variety of subjects, including divorce, child rearing, sexual abuse, homosexuality, racism, breast cancer, agoraphobia, and suicide, to name only a few. What sets the program apart from others of its kind is Winfrey herself. Explained Gillespie: "In Oprah, America got a talk-show host who laughed and cried right along with her guests, shared her troubles and tragedies, made people feel comfortable talking to millions of viewers about the most intimate stuff. Yet what she said was never predictably `make nice' talk.... Nor is it empty-headed spout. What looks to some people like top-of-the-head questioning and commentary is, in fact, the result of carefully done homework." To Winfrey, the show has an almost religious purpose. "In a profound yet subtle way," she once observed, "it is a ministry, and it does what a ministry should do: uplift people, encourage them and give them a sense of hope about themselves."

While her television program remains the focus of her life, Winfrey is also involved in many other activities. In 1985, for example, she made her debut as a dramatic actress in the film adaptation of Alice Walker's The Color Purple and received an Academy Award nomination for her performance. She followed that up a year later with a starring role in Native Son, the movie version of Richard Wright's novel. In 1989, she acted in the television mini-series "The Women of Brewster Place" and reprised her role in 1990 during its brief run as a regular series. In 1998 she fulfilled one of her dreams in appearing as Sethe, the leading character in Toni Morrison's novel Beloved.

Winfrey is also involved in the business end of film and television production through her own company, Harpo Productions. Established in 1986, its original purpose was to handle the fan mail and publicity for "The Oprah Winfrey Show." Its scope broadened in 1988, however, when Harpo took over the ownership and production of "The Oprah Winfrey Show." Since then, Winfrey has expanded her company's goals to include bringing high-quality projects to film and television. (The Women of Brewster Place and Beloved were produced by Harpo along with other acclaimed productions.) With that in mind, she purchased a huge production facility in Chicago, becoming the first Black-American woman and only the third woman in history (after Mary Pickford and Lucille Ball) to own and run such a complex.

In 1996 Winfrey started a new feature on her talk show, calling the segment Oprah's Book Club. The ensuing monthly book club programs were an instant hit, and by discussing newly published books of her own selection, Winfrey was credited with making best-sellers out of quality books that might have otherwise been considered "sleepers" by the publishing industry. In 2000 she expanded her empire directly into the publishing arena by launching a lifestyle magazine for women, called O. The Oprah Magazine. Not surprisingly, in 2001 her name appeared on a list of the ten most influential people in publishing, compiled by Book magazine. O proved extremely popular, increasing its circulation from 500,000 in 2000 to 2.65 million in 2003.

Moving into the print media was not Winfrey's only business move of substance in the early 2000s. In 2000, she was part-owner and co-founder of Oxygen, a cable network aimed at women. Winfrey created several shows for the network, including "Oprah After the Show," which was taped after her syndicated talk show. This program began airing in 2002, and featured Winfrey talking informally with her audience and, on occasion, her show's guests. Winfrey also signed several deals with King World Productions, which syndicated "The Oprah Winfrey Show." In addition to signing a contract extension ensuring her talk show would be on the air through 2011, Winfrey also moved into development for King World. She first began developing syndicated programming via Harpo Productions. One hit featured Dr. Phil McGraw, a hard-nosed psychologist, which began airing in 2002. With this success, King World decided to turn the development of all its syndicated talk shows to Winfrey and her company in 2004. And yet another Winfrey venture, dubbed Oprah & Friends, was launched as a new channel on XM Satellite Radio in September of 2006.

Despite her busy schedule--she typically puts in fourteen-hour days at the office--Winfrey is very generous with her time and money for many charitable causes. She makes time to meet regularly with a group of teenage girls from Chicago's notorious Cabrini-Green housing project, taking them to movies or to dinner or perhaps on a shopping spree. As the creator and sponsor of the club, she set the simple but strictly enforced rules: stay in school and don't get pregnant. Winfrey has also established scholarships at her alma mater, Tennessee State University, and at Atlanta's Morehouse College, and she keeps in touch with the recipients to monitor their grades and progress in school. Other charitable projects included distributing $1.25 million through her Angel Network from 2002-2004 to help build schools for Afghan children and donating money to build over 80 homes for Hurricane Katrina victims in 2006. In addition, she lobbied Congress on behalf of a bill she helped draft that proposes creating a national registry of people convicted of child abuse so that child-care providers can better evaluate potential employees. Winfrey was one of several prominent Black-Americans who worked to raise funds to build the National Museum of African-American History in Washington, D.C. She also did charitable work in South Africa, most notably funding a school, The Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in South Africa. It opened its doors in January of 2007.

When asked why she thinks she "made it" despite experiencing things that would have defeated many other women, Winfrey told Ebert, "I honestly don't know. Someone has to show you the light in order to survive, the light of love, and I truly don't know who showed me mine. Except, perhaps God. I always felt He was there." Because of her strong religious faith, she gives little thought to what the future might hold for her. As she remarked to Mary-Ann Bendel in a Ladies' Home Journal article, she believes that every decision she makes is guided by "a spirit--call it holy, call it good, call it God--that works for my highest good always." This confidence has brought her a deep spiritual comfort and the sense that she has nothing to fear, not even failure. "I just do what I do," says Winfrey, "and I know that it will keep me in the best place."