I Found the Following Interview and Found It Very Interesting

Announcing the birth of a baby girl, Oprah, to the proud parents of Vernita and Vernon on January 29, 1954 in Kosciusko, Mississippi.

Dear Diary,1971

I am so excited. I just found out that I got into Tennessee State University. I plan to major in Speech Communications and Performing Arts. I am nervous and excited all at the same time. I am going to really work hard and do well. I hope it is easy for me to make friends and fit in. I am also starting to work here in Nashville broadcasting on the radio for WVOL radio. I think this is an incredible opportunity for me.

I found the following interview and found it very interesting.

Interview: Oprah Winfrey

Entertainment Executive
February 21, 1991
Chicago, Illinois

As a young child, did you have any idea, any vision, of what you wanted to accomplish?

As a young child, I had a vision, not of what I wanted to accomplish, but I knew that my current circumstances --I was raised on a farm with my grandmother for the first six years of my life -- I knew somehow that my life would be different and it would be better. I never had a clear cut vision of what it was that I would be doing. I remember absolutely physically feeling it at around four years old.

Did you ever consider any other career besides talking, broadcasting, acting?

I always wanted to be an actress for most of my adolescent and adult life. My father didn't want me to be, because his idea of "an actress " was one of these "lewd women," and "how are you going to take care of your life?"

So I always wanted to be an actress and have taken, I think, a roundabout way to get there because I still don't feel fulfilled as an actress. I still feel like, okay, once I own my studio, but I'm thinking, I did all of this just to be an actress. I just want to be able to act.

For a while, I wanted to be a school teacher. In the fourth grade, Mrs. Duncan was my greatest inspiration. In the fourth grade was when I first, I think, began to believe in myself. For the first time believed I could do almost anything. I felt I was the queen bee. I felt I could control the world. I was going to be a missionary. I was going to Costa Rica. I used to collect money on the playground to take to church on Sundays from all the other kids. In school we had devotions, and I would sit and I would listen to everything the preacher said on Sunday and go back to school on Monday morning and beg Mrs. Duncan to please let me do devotions, just sort of repeat the sermon. So, in the fourth grade, I was called "preacher."

The kids used to poke fun at me all the time. It didn't bother me because I was so inspired. And a lot of it was because of Mrs. Duncan, Mrs. Duncan, Mrs. Duncan. We did a show not too long ago, and I had favorite teachers on, I just broke down. First of all, it was the first time that I realized that Mrs. Duncan had a name other than Mrs. Duncan. You know, your teachers never have names. I said, sobbing, "Her name's Mary!" I couldn't believe it.

I understand that it's kind of a fluke that your series is not called "The Orpah Winfrey Show." Maybe you could just tell us the story of your name.

Well, I was born, as I said, in rural Mississippi in 1954. I was born at home. There were not a lot of educated people around, and my name had been chosen from the Bible. My Aunt Ida had chosen the name, but nobody really knew how to spell it, so it went down as "Orpah" on my birth certificate, but people didn't know how to pronounce it, so they put the "P" before the "R" in every place else other than the birth certificate. On the birth certificate it is Orpah, but then it got translated to Oprah, so here we are. But that's great because Oprah spells Harpo backwards. I don't know what Orpah spells.

How did you come to live with your grandmother?

I came to live with my grandmother because I was a child born out of wedlock, and my mother moved to the North. She's a part of that great migration to the North in the late 1950s, and I was left with my grandmother, like so many other black youngsters who were left to be taken care of by their grandmothers and grandfathers, aunts and uncles. It actually probably saved my life. It is the reason why I am where I am today. My grandmother gave me the foundation for success that I was allowed to continue to build upon. My grandmother taught me to read, and that opened the door to all kinds of possibilities for me. And had I not been with my grandmother and been with my mother struggling in the North, you know, moving from apartment to apartment, I probably would not have had the foundation that I had.

So I was allowed to grow up in Mississippi for the first six years of my life and allowed to feel somewhat special because I was a precocious child; I guess by any standards now.

You hear about child prodigies on the violin, but you definitely were a prodigy as a speaker. That's very unusual.

I was an orator for a long time. I've been an orator really, basically, all of my life. Since I was 3 and a half, I've been coming up in the church speaking. I did all of James Weldon Johnson's sermons. He has a series of seven sermons, beginning with "The Creation" and ending with "Judgment." I used to do them for churches all over the city of Nashville. I've spoken at every church in Nashville at some point in my life. You sort of get known for that. Other people were known for singing; I was known for talking. By the time I entered college, what I really wanted to do was be an actress, but I got hired in television, and so I was never able to make any of the play rehearsals. Story of my life.

There was a pretty bad patch after you left your grandmother. Maybe you can talk a little bit about what that was like when you were living with your mother.

I was living with my mother and living under circumstances that a lot of young children have to deal with even today. We weren't living in the projects, and if you had asked me at the time if we were poor, I probably would have said, "no" because when you are living it and you don't know anything else, you think that's the way life is. And I was raped when I was nine by a cousin, and never told anybody until I was in my late twenties. Not only was I raped by a cousin, I was raped by a cousin, and then later sexually molested by a friend of the family, and then by an uncle. It was just an ongoing, continuous thing. So much so, that I started to think, you know, "This is the way life is."

And not until, I'd say, a year ago, did I release the shame for myself. I was in the middle of an interview with a woman named Trudy Chase, who has multiple personalities and was severely abused as a child. I think it was on that day that, for the first time, I recognized that I was not to blame.

I became a sexually promiscuous teenager, and got myself into a lot of trouble, and believed that I was responsible for it. It wasn't until I was thirty-six years old, thirty-six, that I connected the fact, "Oh that's why I was that way." I always blamed myself. Even though, intellectually, I would say to other kids, I would speak to people and say, "Oh, the child's never to blame. You're never responsible for molestation in your life." I still believed I was responsible somehow. That I was a bad girl.

Were there any books that you could remember reading when you were a kid that you loved or that influenced you?

Well, I loved books so much as a child. They were my outlet to the world. And I still do. People ask me, "What do you do in your spare time?" That's what I do -- I read. There are so many books. I went through a period of Lois Lensky books. She wrote Strawberry Girl, and lots of stories about these little peasant children. Or I went through a period where I wanted to be them. I would read the character, and whichever book I was reading, that's who I wanted to be that week. I read a book in the third grade about Katie John, who hated boys, and she had freckles. Well Lord knows, I'm not going to have freckles, no way, no how. But I tried to put some on. And I went through "my Katie John phase."

I think the book that moved me most when I was growing up was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I had a tree in my backyard, too, so I identified with her. I just thought, "Oh, this is my life." And then I discovered Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Well, first of all, it was the first time I had ever encountered another woman who had been sexually abused. I could not imagine. I felt that way, too, when I read The Color Purple. I read the first page of The Color Purple, put the book down, and wept. I could not believe it, that someone had put this in writing. It was unbelievable.

Your father apparently had a strong influence on you when you were growing up. He was pretty strict, wasn't he?

Very strict father, but I love him for it today. At the time, I thought I couldn't imagine a human being so strict. And what was he being so strict for? He was a big influence in my life. As strict as he was, he had some concerns about me making the best of my life, and would not accept anything less than what he thought was my best. When I was living with my mother, I was very rebellious. I did everything I could get away with. I used to pull all kinds of pranks. I ran away from home. I used to lie to my mother all the time. I'd stay out and make up stories. I moved to my father's house. I never told another lie because I knew it wasn't going to be accepted. I knew, "Okay, stops right here."

Tell us how you happened to first co-host a talk show, and how that felt.

I only came to co-host a talk show because I had failed at news, and I was going to be fired. And the news director was paying me twenty-two thousand dollars a year. God only knows what my co-anchor was making. Paying me twenty-two thousand dollars a year, and they thought they were paying me too much money to only do news stories. So I got taken off the six o'clock news, and was put on the early morning, like 5:30, cut-ins. And they tried to convince me at the time that, "You are so good that you need your own time period, so we are going to give you five minutes at 5:30 in the morning."

I was devastated because up until that point, I had sort of cruised. I really hadn't thought a lot about my life, or the direction it was taking. I just happened into television, happened into radio. I don't believe in luck. I think luck is preparation meeting opportunity.

I felt like I had somewhat prepared myself, but that I had "happenstanced" into it. I was working in Nashville, and I moved to Baltimore, and I thought "Well, I'll do this for a while, and then I don't know what I'll do." So when I was called in and put on the edge of being fired, certainly demoted, I was devastated. I was twenty-two and embarrassed by the whole thing because I had never failed before.

And it was that failure that led to the talk show. Because they had no place else to put me, they put me on a talk show in the morning. And I'm telling you, the hour I interviewed -- my very first interview was the Carvel Ice Cream Man, and Benny from "All My Children" -- I'll never forget it. I came off the air, thinking, "This is what I should have been doing." Because it was... It was like breathing to me. Like breathing. You just talk. "Be yourself" is really what I had learned to do.

It sounds like you love your work, and so in some ways it's not really work.

It's not work. Steve Martin has a joke about how some people go to the drugstore, and they sell Flair pens. And he says, in a silly voice, "And I get paid for doing this!" I feel the same way. I feel like I would do this if I didn't get a dime for it, and that's why you know you are doing the right thing -- because it doesn't even feel like work.

The Color Purple

Cast overview
Danny Glover / .... / Albert
Whoopi Goldberg / .... / Celie
Margaret Avery / .... / Shug Avery
Oprah Winfrey / .... / Sofia
Willard E. Pugh / .... / Harpo (as Willard Pugh)
Akosua Busia / .... / Nettie
Desreta Jackson / .... / Young Celie
Adolph Caesar / .... / Old Mister
Rae Dawn Chong / .... / Squeak
Dana Ivey / .... / Miss Millie
Leonard Jackson / .... / Pa
Bennet Guillory / .... / Grady
John Patton Jr. / .... / Preacher
Carl Anderson / .... / Reverend Samuel
Susan Beaubian / .... / Corrine

Directed by
Steven Spielberg

Winfrey's parents, who never married, were teens when she was born in rural Mississippi. She was originally named Orpah after a woman from the Book of Ruth but a spelling mistake on the birth certificate changed it to Oprah.