Oprah Winfrey
American talk show host, actress, producer, and author (born 1954)
Oprah Gail Winfrey (; born Orpah Gail Winfrey; January 29, 1954) is an American media mogul, actress, executive producer, author, and television personality. She is best known for her talk show, The Oprah Winfrey Show, broadcast from Chicago, which ran in national syndication for 25 years, from 1986 to 2011. Globally, she is the richest Black woman and the wealthiest female celebrity. Dubbed the "Queen of All Media", she was the richest African-American of the 20th century and was once the world's only Black billionaire. By 2007, she was often ranked as the most influential woman in the world and in 2026 was named the greatest living self-made American.
Winfrey was born into poverty in rural Mississippi to a single teenage mother and later raised in inner-city Milwaukee. Winfrey was then sent to live with the man she calls her father, Vernon Winfrey, a barber in Nashville, Tennessee, and landed a job in radio while still in high school. By 19, she was a co-anchor for the local evening news. Winfrey's often emotional, extemporaneous delivery eventually led to her transfer 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.
Credited with creating a more intimate, confessional form of media communication, Winfrey popularized and revolutionized the tabloid talk show genre pioneered by Phil Donahue.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Oprah Winfrey” is american talk show host, actress, producer, and author (born 1954). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Oprah, Winfrey and American, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “american talk show host, actress, producer, and author (born 1954)” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q55800. VIAF identifies the subject as 27226716. The Library of Congress control number is n86057994. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1954, 1986, 2011 and 2007.
Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.
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Three-step research path
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- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Oprah Winfrey” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.