(4 of 4)
A bright and attractive teenager (she was Miss Black Tennessee of 1971), Oprah began her TV career as a reporter and anchor for the CBS affiliate in Nashville while she was still a student at Tennessee State. Later, at Baltimore's WJZ-TV, the TV imagemakers went to work. A botched attempt at a permanent caused all her hair to fall out temporarily. More important, her inexperience led to her being dumped as anchorwoman. "I was 22 years old," she says. "I had no business anchoring the news in a major market." She was given another chance, as co-host of a morning talk show, and instantly found her niche. "I said to myself, 'This is what I should be doing. It's like breathing.' "
Oprah breathed new life into the ratings and repeated the trick seven years later, when she became host of WLS's struggling AM Chicago show. The program, which went national in September 1986, has won a huge following by focusing -- unduly, say some critics -- on the often bizarre nooks and crannies of human misfortune. "There is a commonality in human experience," Oprah contends. "If it's happened to one person, it has happened to thousands of others. Our shows are hour-long life lessons."
Playing the role of Sofia in Steven Spielberg's 1985 film The Color Purple was a life lesson of its own. Oprah landed the part by a stroke of harmonic convergence. She read Alice Walker's novel, gave copies to friends and said she felt destined to appear in a movie version. When the film's co-producer, Quincy Jones, turned up in Chicago to testify in a lawsuit, he saw Oprah's show and arranged an audition. Oprah regarded the entire experience with near mystical awe. "It was a spiritual evolvement for me," she says. "I learned to love people doing that film."
Oprah's charmed career has not been without a few snags. Her second film, Native Son, based on Richard Wright's novel, was a flop at the box office, and a prospective sitcom for ABC, starring Oprah as a talk-show host, was scuttled after a mediocre pilot. Most of her attention is now focused on bringing to the screen projects that are close to her -- like Beloved and Kaffir Boy, an autobiography set in South Africa. "I want to do movies that are about something, that move people and leave them feeling uplifted." Though most of them involve black authors and subject matter, Oprah resists being cast as a spokeswoman for her race. "If other people perceive me to be representative of black people in this country, it is a false perception. The fact that I sit where I sit today, you can't deny there have been some major advances. But I'm still just one black woman."
One driven black woman. "She is one of the most directed people I know," says Dori Wilson, a Chicago publicist. "She wants to go straight to the top." Yet she is trying to relax a bit, cutting back on her travel and free- lance good deeds. "I used to take every phone call from a guy who said he would jump off a building if I didn't talk to him. But I no longer feel compelled to aid every crazy. For two years I have done everything everyone asked me to do. I am now officially exhausted." And unofficially still barreling ahead.