FOR SOMEONE BESTOWED with such a heavy mantle, Winfrey is astonishingly lighthearted. “I am probably one of the most content, peaceful people you will ever meet,” she says during a conversation in Los Angeles, a two-and-a-half-hour drive from her home in Montecito, a wealthy, tight-knit community of almost 9,000. Part of that contentment clearly stems from the fact that since 2011, when Winfrey shut down the show that made her fame and much of her fortune, she’s been released from the 15-hour schedule that defined her days for decades and is free to choose her projects. “The thing about her being so powerful is that she doesn’t have to tolerate what does not nourish her,” says DuVernay, who, in addition to being Winfrey’s director on Wrinkle and 2014’s Selma, developed the breakout television drama Queen Sugar for OWN. “She has the power and the ability to practice ultimate discretion. Whatever she wants to do she does. Whatever she doesn’t want to do she does not.”
One of Winfrey’s first moves was to leave Chicago, which had been home for almost 30 years, and settle into her 65-acre West Coast digs. Aptly dubbed the Promised Land, the property features a view of the Pacific, a lavish rose garden and a teahouse where she reads the Sunday papers and, typically, three books a week. The first time Witherspoon visited Winfrey at the oasis she created, the actress burst into tears: “I said, ‘You did this,’ ” Witherspoon says. “You have to remember, she comes from nothing. She doesn’t take anything for granted.”
In addition to the 60 Minutes gig and the new Wrinkle film (in which she plays the wise, celestial being Mrs. Which), Winfrey’s book The Wisdom of Sundays, based on her Super Soul Sunday conversations, debuted in October and immediately topped the New York Times bestseller list. In December, Discovery Communications paid $70 million to increase its stake in OWN, a top cable network for African-American women and one of the fastest growing networks for women in general. Winfrey’s Harpo Inc. will retain a significant minority interest in the media property, and she will continue in her role as CEO. By the time Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture opened in 2016, she had given $21 million, the largest gift to the museum by a single donor, and last year the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls, the boarding school in South Africa to which she has contributed more than $150 million, celebrated its 10th anniversary.
As for her current stress-free state, she says, “What a nice thing to come to. What if I’d been pissed off, if I’d left the show and been upset, trying to figure out the whys of life?” Clearly, she’s gotten something of a handle on the latter, though there were a few bumps in the road.
Early on, she says, she realized she was absorbing the emotions of her guests on The Oprah Winfrey Show to an unhealthy degree. “It wasn’t just a show for me. It really was me being part of the human exchange, the whole human array of functions and dysfunctions,” she says. “I’d go home, and I’d be overwhelmed. I was getting sick. I had to learn how to put up just a little bit of a shield but also to be fully present through that veil.” In her 50s (she is now 64), Winfrey had a different kind of health scare when a thyroid issue went undiagnosed. “I thought I was dying every night, because I had heart palpitations,” she says. “I went to five different doctors, and each of them gave me a prescription for a different kind of heart medication, and it turned out I didn’t have a heart problem at all.”
Her 50s also turned out to be the beginning of her current chapter. She refers often to what her late friend Maya Angelou said about the 50s being the decade when you become who you were meant to be. “There’s a quickening that happens, and your body, your hormones, everything is saying, ‘Hey, you don’t have as much time as you once had—let’s get on with it!’ ” she says. “You get to step into your true beauty, your true value, your true worth, without everyone else’s opinions and judgments of what you should be.”
She was 57 when she stopped broadcasting The Oprah Winfrey Show and 62 when she shuttered Harpo Studios. Recently bulldozed to make way for McDonald’s global headquarters, the building had become something of a landmark in Chicago, a city she never truly got to know. “I’d get picked up at 5:30 in the morning in my apartment building’s garage, and then I’d be picked up at the studio at 8:30 at night,” she says. Weekends were spent in a nearby country house in Indiana, until, in 2001, while on a photo shoot, she discovered the place in Montecito (a town recently in the news for twin tragedies, the Thomas fire that destroyed scores of houses and the subsequent devastating mudslides that claimed at least 20 lives).
IN 2016, when she heard DuVernay was filming Wrinkle in New Zealand, she all but leapt off the porch—but not necessarily to act. “She called me and said, ‘I hear you are filming in New Zealand, and I want to come hang out,’ ” DuVernay says. “I said, ‘That’s good because I was going to ask you to be in it.’ ” Winfrey, it should be noted, received an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress in the first film in which she acted, The Color Purple, despite the fact that she’d never had formal training. “As an actor she has great empathy,” says DuVernay. “True actors, the best actors, actually become another person. Through the run of The Oprah Winfrey Show…she was practicing her craft, trying to walk in the shoes of another.”
Though the director says Winfrey gets offered “everything to do with a woman of a certain age, black, white or otherwise,” she feels that acting is part of the Winfrey pantheon of talents that is most often overlooked. “When you think about her empire, you think of the show and all that,” DuVernay says, “but the acting would have been enough to have made her mark.”
As in all things, Winfrey is mindful of her choices. “Her discernment in what characters she wants to lend herself to is very precise—Deborah Lacks, for example,” DuVernay says. (In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Winfrey plays the daughter of an African-American woman whose cancer cells were taken from her without her knowledge or consent and have been used for important medical research ever since.) “That role really resonated with women in the black community, which is what her intention was.”
With Wrinkle, her aim was to have a good time, and by all accounts she achieved it. “I can’t remember the last time I had that much fun,” Winfrey says. “We were fired up. We were alive in that trailer every morning. Reese was the DJ, playing all this old Southern blues music. We listened to more Sam Cooke than I’ve heard since I was a kid.” Not only did she adore New Zealand (“It resonated with me…. There’s a heightened sense of color there that feels like another vibration,” she says), she had a blast with the cast. Witherspoon—who hails from Nashville, where Winfrey moved when she was 14 (“I think Southern girls have a thing,” Winfrey says)—first met her co-star when she was promoting the 2005 film Walk the Line on The Oprah Winfrey Show. “She completely Oprah-Showed me! I burst into tears talking about my high school English teacher,” Witherspoon says.
During the shoot, the two forged a different bond. “We had at least four hours doing hair and makeup every day, and Oprah could have had her own trailer,” the actress says. “But she decided she wanted to do it with Mindy [Kaling] and myself. She really is like your best friend. She’s relatable, she loves to have a good time, she loves to drink a margarita.”
PLEASE READ THE REST OF THIS INTERVIEW IN
WSJ (THE WALL STREET JOURNAL)
FOR SOMEONE BESTOWED with such a heavy mantle, Winfrey is astonishingly lighthearted. “I am probably one of the most content, peaceful people you will ever meet,” she says during a conversation in Los Angeles, a two-and-a-half-hour drive from her home in Montecito, a wealthy, tight-knit community of almost 9,000. Part of that contentment clearly stems from the fact that since 2011, when Winfrey shut down the show that made her fame and much of her fortune, she’s been released from the 15-hour schedule that defined her days for decades and is free to choose her projects. “The thing about her being so powerful is that she doesn’t have to tolerate what does not nourish her,” says DuVernay, who, in addition to being Winfrey’s director on Wrinkle and 2014’s Selma, developed the breakout television drama Queen Sugar for OWN. “She has the power and the ability to practice ultimate discretion. Whatever she wants to do she does. Whatever she doesn’t want to do she does not.”
One of Winfrey’s first moves was to leave Chicago, which had been home for almost 30 years, and settle into her 65-acre West Coast digs. Aptly dubbed the Promised Land, the property features a view of the Pacific, a lavish rose garden and a teahouse where she reads the Sunday papers and, typically, three books a week. The first time Witherspoon visited Winfrey at the oasis she created, the actress burst into tears: “I said, ‘You did this,’ ” Witherspoon says. “You have to remember, she comes from nothing. She doesn’t take anything for granted.”
In addition to the 60 Minutes gig and the new Wrinkle film (in which she plays the wise, celestial being Mrs. Which), Winfrey’s book The Wisdom of Sundays, based on her Super Soul Sunday conversations, debuted in October and immediately topped the New York Times bestseller list. In December, Discovery Communications paid $70 million to increase its stake in OWN, a top cable network for African-American women and one of the fastest growing networks for women in general. Winfrey’s Harpo Inc. will retain a significant minority interest in the media property, and she will continue in her role as CEO. By the time Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture opened in 2016, she had given $21 million, the largest gift to the museum by a single donor, and last year the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls, the boarding school in South Africa to which she has contributed more than $150 million, celebrated its 10th anniversary.
As for her current stress-free state, she says, “What a nice thing to come to. What if I’d been pissed off, if I’d left the show and been upset, trying to figure out the whys of life?” Clearly, she’s gotten something of a handle on the latter, though there were a few bumps in the road.
Early on, she says, she realized she was absorbing the emotions of her guests on The Oprah Winfrey Show to an unhealthy degree. “It wasn’t just a show for me. It really was me being part of the human exchange, the whole human array of functions and dysfunctions,” she says. “I’d go home, and I’d be overwhelmed. I was getting sick. I had to learn how to put up just a little bit of a shield but also to be fully present through that veil.” In her 50s (she is now 64), Winfrey had a different kind of health scare when a thyroid issue went undiagnosed. “I thought I was dying every night, because I had heart palpitations,” she says. “I went to five different doctors, and each of them gave me a prescription for a different kind of heart medication, and it turned out I didn’t have a heart problem at all.”
Her 50s also turned out to be the beginning of her current chapter. She refers often to what her late friend Maya Angelou said about the 50s being the decade when you become who you were meant to be. “There’s a quickening that happens, and your body, your hormones, everything is saying, ‘Hey, you don’t have as much time as you once had—let’s get on with it!’ ” she says. “You get to step into your true beauty, your true value, your true worth, without everyone else’s opinions and judgments of what you should be.”
She was 57 when she stopped broadcasting The Oprah Winfrey Show and 62 when she shuttered Harpo Studios. Recently bulldozed to make way for McDonald’s global headquarters, the building had become something of a landmark in Chicago, a city she never truly got to know. “I’d get picked up at 5:30 in the morning in my apartment building’s garage, and then I’d be picked up at the studio at 8:30 at night,” she says. Weekends were spent in a nearby country house in Indiana, until, in 2001, while on a photo shoot, she discovered the place in Montecito (a town recently in the news for twin tragedies, the Thomas fire that destroyed scores of houses and the subsequent devastating mudslides that claimed at least 20 lives).
IN 2016, when she heard DuVernay was filming Wrinkle in New Zealand, she all but leapt off the porch—but not necessarily to act. “She called me and said, ‘I hear you are filming in New Zealand, and I want to come hang out,’ ” DuVernay says. “I said, ‘That’s good because I was going to ask you to be in it.’ ” Winfrey, it should be noted, received an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress in the first film in which she acted, The Color Purple, despite the fact that she’d never had formal training. “As an actor she has great empathy,” says DuVernay. “True actors, the best actors, actually become another person. Through the run of The Oprah Winfrey Show…she was practicing her craft, trying to walk in the shoes of another.”
Though the director says Winfrey gets offered “everything to do with a woman of a certain age, black, white or otherwise,” she feels that acting is part of the Winfrey pantheon of talents that is most often overlooked. “When you think about her empire, you think of the show and all that,” DuVernay says, “but the acting would have been enough to have made her mark.”
As in all things, Winfrey is mindful of her choices. “Her discernment in what characters she wants to lend herself to is very precise—Deborah Lacks, for example,” DuVernay says. (In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Winfrey plays the daughter of an African-American woman whose cancer cells were taken from her without her knowledge or consent and have been used for important medical research ever since.) “That role really resonated with women in the black community, which is what her intention was.”
With Wrinkle, her aim was to have a good time, and by all accounts she achieved it. “I can’t remember the last time I had that much fun,” Winfrey says. “We were fired up. We were alive in that trailer every morning. Reese was the DJ, playing all this old Southern blues music. We listened to more Sam Cooke than I’ve heard since I was a kid.” Not only did she adore New Zealand (“It resonated with me…. There’s a heightened sense of color there that feels like another vibration,” she says), she had a blast with the cast. Witherspoon—who hails from Nashville, where Winfrey moved when she was 14 (“I think Southern girls have a thing,” Winfrey says)—first met her co-star when she was promoting the 2005 film Walk the Line on The Oprah Winfrey Show. “She completely Oprah-Showed me! I burst into tears talking about my high school English teacher,” Witherspoon says.
During the shoot, the two forged a different bond. “We had at least four hours doing hair and makeup every day, and Oprah could have had her own trailer,” the actress says. “But she decided she wanted to do it with Mindy [Kaling] and myself. She really is like your best friend. She’s relatable, she loves to have a good time, she loves to drink a margarita.”
PLEASE READ THE REST OF THIS INTERVIEW IN WSJ (THE WALL STREET JOURNAL)
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