American media personality, actress, producer, and philanthropist, Oprah Winfrey was born on January 29, 1954, and she’s best known for her multi-award-winning talk show The Oprah Winfrey Show which was the highest-rated program of its kind in history and was nationally syndicated from 1986 to 2011.
Dubbed the “Queen of All Media”, she has been ranked one of the richest African-American of the 20th century, and the greatest black philanthropist in American history, currently North America’s only black billionaire. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama and an honorary doctorate degree from Harvard University.
In the video below, Winfrey shares her inspirational grass to grace story at the Forbes 400 Summit! She was born into poverty in rural Mississippi to a teenage single mother and later raised in an inner-city Milwaukee neighborhood. She experienced considerable hardship during her childhood, saying she was raped at age nine and became pregnant at 14; her son died in infancy. She was then sent to live 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 way of delivering the news 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.
