Oprah Winfrey is an American media proprietor, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist. She is best known for her talk show The Oprah Winfrey Show, which was the highest-rated television program of its kind in history and was nationally syndicated from 1986 to 2011 in Chicago, Illinois. Dubbed the "Queen of All Media", she has been ranked the richest African-American, the greatest black philanthropist in American history, and is North America's first multi-billionaire black person.

Winfrey was born into a poor family in Mississippi, but this didn't stop her from winning a scholarship to Tennessee State University and becoming the first African-American TV correspondent in the state at the age of 19. In 1983, Winfrey moved to Chicago to work for an AM talk show that would later be called The Oprah Winfrey Show.