Oprah Winfrey

Oprah Winfrey (born 1954) built the largest platform in American television and then used a fraction of it to act. The Oprah Winfrey Show ran in national syndication out of Chicago for twenty five years, from 1986 to 2011, and by 2007 she was routinely ranked the most influential woman in the world. She is the richest Black woman alive and the wealthiest female celebrity, was the richest African American of the twentieth century, and was for a time the only Black billionaire anywhere. In 2026 she was named the greatest living self-made American.

The acting is a smaller catalogue and a more interesting one than the scale of the rest suggests. Her earliest film credit here is Sofia in The Color Purple in 1985, and the parts that followed share a quality: she is cast as women who will not move. Annie Lee Cooper in Selma, Gloria Gaines in The Butler and Mary McLeod Bethune in The Six Triple Eight are all people whose refusal is the point of the scene, and she plays them with the stillness of somebody who has never needed to raise her voice to be obeyed.

The rest is voice work or versions of herself. She is Eudora in The Princess and the Frog, Gussy the Goose in Charlotte's Web and Judge Bumbleton in Bee Movie, and she appears as Oprah Winfrey in Ocean's Thirteen and Throw Momma from the Train. Her awards include Golden Globes, a National Book Award and a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Television Movie.