At the next Oscars, on March 10, Oprah Winfrey will be dressed in purple.
It is not a prediction, it is that the businesswoman, presenter, actress, producer and girlfriend of America, born in Mississippi exactly 70 years ago this Monday, January 28, has been doing it this way for months.
Because when Winfrey commits to something she doesn't let go, and this season her commitment is one of the biggest she has ever assumed in her life: she is the producer of the film
The Color Purple,
the adaptation of the musical that is, in turn, a version of the novel by Alice Walker.
The book had already been made into a film in 1985 by Steven Spielberg in a film for which Winfrey herself was nominated for the Oscar for best supporting actress.
The presenter considers that job “the most important thing” that has happened in her life.
With a television show that lasted 25 years, a magazine, a television channel, a production company, a dozen properties, a strong philanthropic investment and $2.8 billion behind her, she is certainly a strong statement.
But Oprah (no, she doesn't need a last name) is like that: solid, eloquent, determined.
Controlling, according to some.
The tentacles of his power have spread for half a century through almost all branches of entertainment in the United States, since in high school he began to collaborate with a radio station and, at the age of 19, in the mid-seventies, he She became a reporter and presenter on local television.
And from there to her television
show The Oprah Winfrey Show
, between 1986 and 2011, on whose sofa she sat Tom Cruise, George W. Bush, Sarah Ferguson, Whitney Houston and Bill Clinton.
But not only.
Her book club, with more than 100 recommended books in the last 28 years, sets the editorial tone and gives a boost in sales to her recommendations.
She is no stranger to politics either: the Obamas are close, and five years ago she picked up the phone to convince Mitt Romney to run as an independent candidate in 2020 (he even said demanding that he take her as vice president; she denied it). .
She has even floated the idea of her running as a candidate for president.
Donald Trump even said that “it would be fun.”
She herself had to deny it: “I don't have the DNA to do that.”
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It's not that she's not capable, it's that Winfrey doesn't need it to be what she is: one of the most powerful women in the world (the 31st, according to
Forbes
, above Beyoncé, the US ambassador to the UN or the president of Honduras or the director of the New York Stock Exchange) and one of the most respected voices in the country.
And, besides, she loves what she does.
She is demonstrating it now, with unbridled vitality at her recently turned 70 years old.
She has not missed a single one of the events, premieres and award ceremonies of
The Color Purple
, she has participated in debates, talks,
late nights
, interviews, promotional videos.
She says at every opportunity that the film changed everything: “It was the most important thing in my life, and it remains a central issue for me,” she said in
People
.
When Steven Spielberg called her for the role of the warrior Sophie in the 1985 film, she had never set foot on a movie set, and she is convinced that the $35,000 she earned (about $100,000 today adjusted for inflation, not too much) was “the highest paid $35,000 in the world.”
“It changed everything and taught me a lot.
It was a thing from God,” she said, that at the time she didn't even know that she didn't have to look at the camera when she acted.
Willard Pugh and Oprah Winfrey in a still from 'The Color Purple' (1985). Courtesy Everett Collection
That film earned 11 Oscar nominations, and also earned her one.
The second, which arrived 30 years later, is a good example of her evolution: it was thanks to
Selma
, about the civil rights march in 1965 and already as a producer, in a complex project that took more than seven years to carry out.
This year, with the new musical version of
The Color Purple,
Winfrey has sneaked, glancingly, into the awards race.
She has only achieved one Oscar nomination, precisely for Danielle Brooks as the new Sophie, the role she played 38 years ago.
Winfrey, for this film, preferred not to even make a cameo.
In these four decades, much has changed for Winfrey.
The girl whose grandmother dressed in potato sacks, semi-abandoned by her mother (as an adult they did not even have her telephone numbers), whose father encouraged her education and interests, has become an authoritative voice for almost everything in your country and in the rest of the world.
Her businesses have helped her achieve levels of power never imagined for her, such as her OWN channel, which she created in 2011 and sold to Warner a decade later in a million-dollar transaction.
That fortune has allowed him to donate more than $425 million throughout her life.
She calls the girls who study at the girls' school she founded in South Africa “daughters.”
Oprah Winfrey speaks from the stage after unveiling her portrait at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in Washington on December 13, 2023. Paul Morigi (Getty Images)
His philanthropy is always associated with his interests, such as when in August he contributed, together with Dwayne Johnson,
The Rock
, 10 million dollars to help the recovery of Lahaina after the terrible fires that devastated this city in Maui (Hawaii).
There he has several properties, because two decades ago he bought no less than 40 hectares in the heart of the island, something for which he has also received criticism, by acquiring such amounts of land.
They have not been the only ones in his career and life, always observed.
The writer Kitty Kelley dedicated a complete biography of her in 2010 where, over 500 pages, she revealed certain secrets of hers, without too many revelations, such as her struggle to stay at a low weight.
Oprah was talking about it a few weeks ago.
“It has been public sport to make fun of me for 25 years, I have been criticized and shamed, and I have criticized and shamed myself,” she revealed in December, stating that her weight changes have “taken up five decades of mental space” in his head.
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Two years after undergoing knee surgery, he says he walks three to five miles a day, eats dinner at four o'clock at the latest, drinks almost four liters of water a day and follows the Weight Watchers diet. which bought 10% in 2015. But not only that.
“I knew about the medications [to lose weight], but I felt like I had to prove that I had the willpower to do it.
And now I don't feel that way anymore."
New weight loss drugs, like Ozempic, are the order of the day in Hollywood.
And Winfrey no longer hides her use.
She is oblivious to all criticism, and has become the perfect ambassador of herself, adored by the entire country, by every branch.
Her power in the world of film was recognized in December by the Hollywood Film Academy, which awarded her its Pillar Award “in appreciation of her leadership and exemplary support” of her in the industry. .
A couple of weeks later she received another tribute, when the National Portrait Gallery, in Washington, unveiled her painting in the most illustrious portrait gallery in the United States. Of course, she was dressed in purple.
Not in the ceremony, but in the portrait.
Forever.