Did you know?: Oprah Winfrey’s shares first audition tape

Winfrey shares a tape from 1983 when she was just a young TV personality.

Before Oprah Winfrey became the $2.9 billion media mogul she is today, the TV personality started her career in local news. The talk show host unearthed her first ever audition tape and it seems that she wasn’t always the polished TV star, she is today.

The billionaire media mogul shares a tape from 1983 when she was just a young TV personality trying to take her career to the next level. After hearing that a Chicago-based morning show needed a new host, Winfrey stayed up all night with an editor to put together an audition tape.

The 60 year old got the gig and within a few months AM Chicago trumped The Phil Donahue Show to become the highest-rated talk show in Chicago.

By 1986, the show was renamed The Oprah Winfrey Show, which was broadcast nationally, again shooting to the top of the ratings.

“In a field dominated by white males, she is a black female of ample bulk. As interviewers go, she is no match for, say, Phil Donahue... What she lacks in journalistic toughness, she makes up for it in plain-spoken curiosity, robust humour and, above all, empathy,” said TIME magazine.  

Published in The Express Tribune, May 9^th, 2014.

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