Talk show host who began as a standard ratings-grabbing daytime talk show, but gradually used her popularity to advocate for causes she believes in and help support women. She did a great job transitioning from talk show to influencer, and I don’t mean lame social media influencer.
She is a cultural icon to a certain extent, helped maybe in part by her unique name, but really because it turned out she is actually quite intelligent and natural business leader.
I’ve never seen her show beyond 10 second clips, but she is nationally one of the most famous women in the United States.
Fun fact: She owed Roger Ebert almost everything. He encouraged her, while on a date with him(yes, a date!), to syndicate her show nationally. He did the math with her on how much she could earn…and of course vastly underestimated how much those earnings would eventually be.
For anyone who’s interested in Oprah as a public figure, there is a really interesting podcast about the beef debacle in the Maintenance Phase podcast. There are actually a few episodes about Oprah, and all of them are fascinating. I would say they come down on the “critical of Oprah” side but not with any sort of vitriol, just a candid examination of how Oprah has carefully shaped the narrative around herself and some ways in which she has refused accountability for what gets put on her show. For those unaware of the podcast, it’s a fun and snarky show about various weight loss and diet topics. I think of it as the “Reply All” of wellness scandals.
Do you have a cite? I’d love to read more about that.
Also, I’m not really in Oprah’s demographic, and have never watched her, except for clips here and there. But i admire her business skills. And i don’t think she’s promoted an excessive amount of bad science for her job and her influence. No one is perfect. She seems pretty decent, overall.
She originally became famous because she was a talk show host. She then parlayed that fame into being a rich media executive, among other things. Now, she’s famous mostly for being a rich media executive. None of this is “famous for being famous”. For comparison, Elon Musk, Michael Eisner, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffet are also famous for being rich executives, and nobody would ever say any of them are “famous for being famous”.
If you want a detailed history of Oprah’s life, you might start by reading the fairly long Wikipedia entry on her. I can’t find any detailed, thoroughly researched, recent biography of her, so I don’t know what to recommend if you want a very good understanding of her life. She deserves to have such a book written about her.
Haven’t seen this mentioned in scanning the thread (not just a talk show host):
"The Color Purple has been a full-circle experience for Oprah Winfrey. The multihyphenate star was nominated for an Oscar for her breakout film role as Sofia in the 1985 film. Now, nearly four decades later, she’s gearing up to release the musical version she co-produced, based on the Broadway show .
Then why’d she do it? And let’s not forget, she gave us Dr. Phil, the disgraced therapist and Dr.Oz, the snake oil salesman. She produced their shows and made millions off them.
I don’t watch Oprah. But her success seems to be a mixture of legendary skills at connecting with people, interviewing well, business acumen and some self-aggrandizement. By publicizing difficult issues - and sometimes being the first big name to do so, encouraging reading and education, and being empathetic, surely she has done more good than the transient harms of having some controversial guests, a little new age puffery or the oddness of putting yourself on a magazine cover on hundreds of occasions. I don’t begrudge her her success; she seems pretty talented. No one disses Morton Downey Jr. or similar terrible contemporaneous TV hosts who often only offered viewers mindless fare and someone they could look down on.
But could I explain her to non-Americans? Not sure. How do the women of country X feel about her? Asking the men may not yield the same responses.
People are getting wrapped up in the phrase. Mostly I think because it’s used for influencers and D-list celebrities. It’s also used for people like the Kardashians who although had seedier beginnings are also very shrewd business people. Anyone you can call “famous for being famous” that are actually successful are also shrewd business people. I say that Oprah is now famous for being famous because she is an American icon. The average person can’t run down her history like people in this thread. The average person might not be able to tell you what she is famous for beyond maybe “she’s on tv.” But everyone knows who Oprah is. So maybe the phrase shouldn’t be “famous for being famous” maybe it should be “famous for being Oprah.”
Maybe most folks can’t give her full history, but most folks can at least tell you that she started as a talk show host. Compare that to Kim Kardashian, whose fame started with a reality show about what it’s like to be famous, like Kim Kardashian.
Paris Hilton is the one to me that is the original poster child (at least in my generation) for “famous for being famous.” I had never even heard the phrase until her. Yes, she’s part of the Hilton family, but I had never even heard of her when she started popping up everywhere in the early 00s? Or was it late 90s? She actually does seem to be a shrewd business woman to me, but she really played up the ditzy socialite angle for a bit there. Who was the other woman she palled around with back then? Nicole Richie. Another one I only know for being famous. (Though it seems she has faded into the background of pop culture.) I couldn’t tell you what else she’s been up to.
Though unlike the anti-vax issue it’s hard to claim Oprah was on the wrong side of that one. The established view, that there was no chance of BSE spreading to humans through beef consumption was wrong. Oprah was right there was a risk (though you could argue that’s a case of a stopped clock being right twice a day) . The fact that almost all the human cases were in the UK not the US doesn’t change that (the government and the beef industry in the UK was saying exactly the same thing there and they were dead wrong).
And she definitely did a great service to free speech by fighting the lawsuit about it (she could have just settled out of court and spent much less time and money)
I’m older than you - I think the Gabors were the original Kardashians. They did some acting but by the 70s , they mostly seemed to be famous for being married a lot.
Yeah, I definitely knew Zsa Zsa as some rich Hungarian woman who was married a lot, and Eva I remember from Green Acres. (I actually even have their mother’s cookbook for some reason, Jolie Gabor’s Family Cookbook.)