“Opportunities don't happen, you create them” (Chris Grosser).
Oprah Gail Winfrey was born to Vinita Lee and Vernon Winfrey on an isolated farm in Kosciusko, Mississippi, United State on January 29, 1954. Her name was supposed to be Orpah, from the Bible, but because of the difficulty of spelling and pronunciation, she was known as Oprah almost from birth. She was black.
She was very determined woman, she lived her most of time under the poverty. She lived with her grandmother but after sometime at the age of six she came back to her mother, who worked for long hours as a cleaner. Oprah Winfrey was an unmarried teenage mother. When she was at the age of nine, Winfrey was raped by a cousin, and over the next few years she was sexually abused by other men. She had stated that she was molested during her childhood and early teens and became pregnant at the age fourteen. She went to live with her father because she wanted to hide the fact, but the destiny had designed something most harsh beside her thoughts. She gave birth to premature infant, but he died.
Living with her father and stepmother provided strength and high expectations her father expected good grades at school. When she was seventeen, Winfrey won a beauty show sponsored by a local radio station.
Someone looking her that she had an ability to read the newspaper she had very attractive, energetic, warm and smooth voice that was influenced him to give her job and she did it very well. He had offered her a part-time job. She knew that it’s not my destiny. She worked very hard to achieve her goal in his life. She had selected her goal to be a billionaire. She worked there and after sometime she moved to Baltimore to work for WJZ-TV as a news reporter and co-anchor of the six o’clock news. She was black; people were not accepting her because she was black. Winfrey was moved to a morning slot, but she and Sher were eventually paired for a talk show, ‘People Are Talking’. They got fame. Sher said about Winfrey that she was commendable. She was very compassionate as she left the news and went for talk show. The main reason behind her objective was that she had developed and emotional instincts towards child abuse and torture due to her own childhood experiences.
She was so emotional that she cried a lot whenever she heard about such incidents, that’s the reason of her fame in public. In the next move, she sent an audition tape to WLS-TV Chicago. She had given a morning talk show which became very successful and known as ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show’. At the same time, she had recommended for a role in the adaptation ‘The Color Purple’ by Steven Spielberg. In 2011, she had ended her talk show and setup her own cable channel and she became a billionaire. She had become very powerful woman as she credited with everything from liberalizing US culture to modernize America’s publishing industry with her book club. Her talk show was very successful as the guests and the host talked about all societal problems, including divorce, child abuse to drug addiction, and hence it proved to be a platform for self-assistance and development. Winfrey said in her speech: “In my career, what I have always tried my best to do, whether on television or through films, is to say how we experience shame, how we love and how we rage, how we fail, how we retreat, preserve and how we overcome”. Christina Greer, an associate professor of political science at Fordham University and author of ‘Black Ethnics’, said: “She is the first black billionaire and in black community she holds a special place because she showed the courage to convert ‘poverty into success’. As a woman she is shown that it is possible to become a millionaire, and then a billionaire, without having a husband who does it for you”. Winfrey has been with her partner Stedman Graham since 1986, but they never married.
It is obvious that nothing could stop Oprah Winfrey from becoming a successful woman. No matter how many obstacles she faced, she did not let anything stop her from becoming nobody to somebody. She tried as hard as she could to get over painful memories and achieve what she wanted to achieve. She wanted to make history and does not want her name to be forgotten. It's safe to say she reached her goal. Oprah Winfrey is a name that will never be forgotten.
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Oprah Winfrey and Her Journey Towards Success.
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