Oprah Gail Winfrey was born on January 29, 1954 and is an American talk show host, television producer, actress, author, and philanthropist. She is best known for her talk show, The Oprah Winfrey Show, broadcast from Chicago, which was the highest-rated television program of its kind in history and ran in national syndication for 25 years from 1986 to 2011.  Dubbed the “Queen of All Media”, she was the richest African American of the 20th century and North America’s first black multi-billionaire,  and she has been ranked the greatest black philanthropist in American history. By 2007, she was sometimes ranked as the most influential woman in the world.

In 1985, Winfrey co-starred in Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple as distraught housewife Sofia. She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance. The Alice Walker novel went on to become a Broadway musical which opened in late 2005, with Winfrey credited as a producer. In October 1998, Winfrey produced and starred in the film Beloved, based on Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name.

In 2004, Winfrey became the first black person to rank among the 50 most generous Americans and she remained among the top 50 until 2010.  By 2012, she had given away about $400 million to educational causes.  In 2013, Winfrey donated $12 million to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.  President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom later that same year.

At the end of the 20th century, Life listed Winfrey as both the most influential woman and the most influential black person of her generation, and in a cover story profile the magazine called her “America’s most powerful woman”