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Oprah Gail Winfrey (born January 29, 1954) is the American multiple-Emmy Award winning host of The Oprah Winfrey Show, the highest-rated talk show in television history.[1] She is also an influential book critic, an Academy Award-nominated actress, and a magazine publisher. She has been ranked the richest African American of the 20th century,[2] the most philanthropic African American of all time,[3] and the world's only black billionaire for three straight years.[4][5][6][7] She is also, according to some assessments, the most influential woman in the world.[8][9] Born in rural Mississippi to a poor unwed teenaged mother, and later raised in a Milwaukee ghetto, Winfrey was raped at the age of nine, and at fourteen, gave birth to a son who died in infancy. 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 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[5], she launched her own production company and became internationally syndicated. Credited with creating a more intimate confessional form of media communication[10], she is thought to have popularized and revolutionized[11] [10][12] the tabloid talk show genre pioneered by Phil Donahue, which a Yale study claimed broke 20th century taboos and allowed gays, transsexuals, and transgender people to enter the mainstream. [13] By the mid 1990s she had reinvented her show with a focus on literature, self-improvement, and spirituality. Though criticized for unleashing confession culture[12] and promoting controversial self-help fads, she is generally admired for overcoming adversity to become a benefactor to others.[14] Pay It Forward Movie Pay It Forward Foundation Pay It Forward Movement Pay It Forward |