Oprah Winfrey on Turning 70, Gratitude and How 'The Color Purple' "Changed Everyt hing" | People

I have always felt like there was a calling on my life and I responded to the call. I obeyed the call. I listened. And the reason why 70 feels so solid and feels so good is because I didn't have to harm anybody in the process. Not only did I not harm, I actually brought a lot of joy to people. When I was a little kid living on a dirt road in Mississippi, a red dirt road as a matter of fact, I was the one that was always playing the teacher and I was the teacher. And if we were playing house, I was the mother. Even if I was the younger girl, I would have to be the mother over everybody else. So some people call that bossy. I just call it, well, I know better, so I should be the one. I should be the teacher because I'm the one that knows. And so I would have to say that teaching is my first love. It is my first love. And the thing that still delights and brings me the greatest level of satisfaction is having a conversation. And in the middle of the conversation, someone discovers something or hears something and says or thinks, Oh, I never thought of it that way before. I love that experience for myself. I love to be reading something or talking to somebody and hear something and suddenly, Wow, that's a new way of thinking about it. I hadn't thought of that before. And I have to tell you, on the Oprah show, when people actually said that out loud, I would just go, Oh, because that's the best thing that could happen. Like, that is what enlightenment is. You present an idea in such a way that somebody goes, Hmm, I hadn't thought of it that way before. I now know that what Maya Angelou told me when I came back from my school, when I went to her house because she wasn't able to come to the opening and I was like, Oh, Maya, this is just going to be the greatest. The school is going to be my greatest legacy. And she said, You have no idea what your legacy is going to be. I said, Oh, no, I think the school is really going to be. It's it, these girls. And she said, I said, You have no idea what your legacy is going to be because your legacy is never one thing. Your legacy is every life you've touched. Every life you've touched. And then she went on to say, It's everybody who ever watched a show and decided because of that show and something you said, I'm going to go back to school. I'm going to leave my abusive husband. I'm going to stop hitting my child. I'm going to get a better bra. I'm going to work out more. I'm going to go check my blood pressure. I'm going to check on my father who I haven't talked to for years. I'm going to forgive my brother. I'm going to it's every life you've touched. And so when I think about that, I think about the number of millions of people, literally millions of people who watched a show and heard something, felt something, were moved by something that opened up the aperture of hope, of possibility, of yearning, of consciousness, just even a little bit. That's a life that I touched. And you just can't get any better than that. I've done multiple interviews over the years. So I sound like some kind of broken record. Gratitude. But it really is my religion. It is the thing that I base my everything on. When I wake up in the morning, it's the first thing I think. I train myself to say thank you first before you start with, what am I going to do? Even this morning in the hotel, I was like, what is the noise outside? Thank you. You go to thank you first. You start your day with thank you. And I end my day with thank you. And that is my spiritual practice. That is my deepest, greatest spiritual practice. And training myself to do that, and if you train yourself to do that, you walk through life feeling the abundance instead of the scarcity. And I get to think about this every day because I live in Montecito, which is about as far from rural Mississippi as Mars is from here. I mean, physically, emotionally, spiritually, dynamically, just what happened on that dirt road in Mississippi versus where my life is now feels like an impossibility. And now that, particularly that it's been 12 years since the Oprah show, there's a whole generation of people who only know me through memes and through what they've heard or their parents have heard or grandparents have heard because what I hear all the time is, my mother loves you, my mother, my mother loves you, which is great, great, great, great, great for me. But what I realize is, is that being able to stand solidly in the maturity of my own spiritual growth has been the thing that has brought me to this point. All my life I had to fight. I had to fight my daddy, I had to fight my uncles, I had to fight my brothers. Color Purple changed my life in all the ways. It was a miracle that I got the role. It was just a miracle because I didn't... It's as big a miracle as my whole life has been because I didn't know one single soul in the business. I didn't know a human being in Hollywood. And I started telling people I'm going to get in that movie. And I thought I was going to be... I didn't know what even a movie set was like. I'd never been to a movie set, so I was like, somebody's got to hold the script, somebody's got to bring them water, somebody's got to do that. And I remember looking at the... Scrolling down when you're watching the films, the credits at the end of the movies, there was something called a Best Boy. Y'all know what that is? There was Best Boy, and I was like, that's the last credit, was Best Boy. And I was like, I'm going to convince them I could be a best girl, whatever that is. Well, I couldn't do that because that's like electrician. I couldn't do that. But anyway, I just was like praying every night, praying every night. I carried the book on my... I had a backpack that I would walk from Wacker Drive, where AM Chicago was done, and I'd carry books of The Color Purple in my backpack, and I would walk home just so I could give out the books to people. This was long before there was a book club. Okay, but I wanted people to read that book, and I'd just be passing out the book. Because when I like a thing, I like a thing, okay? And I believe life is better when you share it, whether that's a candy bar when I was a kid, or whether it's sharing books. So I wanted everybody to read this book. I'd given away to everybody in my office, and now I've run out of people. So I would just go on the street, and I'd just hand out the book. And then I started praying that I would somehow be able to get in this movie, and I get a call. I get a call from Ruben Cannon, who says Quincy Jones was in town in Chicago for a lawsuit that he had to do a deposition for. A lawsuit against Michael Jackson. It was for the song Billie Jean that he had produced, and he had taken a red eye into town. And as he was getting dressed for the deposition, in his hotel room, he had come in at 6 o'clock in the morning, shower, and there I was live on TV. And he saw me. You tell me that ain't a miracle. And so Quincy Jones sees me. He calls and says, I think there's this girl here you need to see. Would you like to work for me? Be my maid? Hell no. And I thought, I don't want to just have a job. I don't just want to be going to work every day. I want to feel like this. I want to feel energized. I want to feel stimulated. I want to feel like I want to get up in the morning because I went to set even when I didn't have to work. Just that being around all of that creative energy. So I built Harpo Studios based on the energy that I felt going on there. The whole culture of Harpo was built on we're a family, we're working together to do something that's really meaningful and creative and inspired for people. Seeing Steven Spielberg have his own studio amblin is what gave me the idea that I could do it for myself. I had no idea you could even do that. I didn't even know there was such a thing. And then I was like, this is yours? Like you own it? What does that mean you own it? And down to the dub bars, just seeing people come in in that room and creating an environment where the staff and the crew and everybody was just like one and everybody working together on one thing, that changed me. So when I say that the color purple had an impact on my life and that the reason why I'm wearing purple is because it is a solidifying and glorifying touchpoint in my life. This time I'll be free from you and then turn to creation. I'd die before I let that happen. I think what we're saying about this version, Fantasia has said it many times, you will be healed when you go to this movie. You will be healed. I don't know, whatever needs healing will get healed. The joyfulness of it, the spirit of forgiveness, the sense of hope, the sense of, you know, no matter how oppressed or challenged you are, that there is life in the imagination. And what we see in this version that you didn't see in Spielberg's version, which I still love, the original, obviously, is that we get inside Celie's head. And so for me to be able to have this moment, I just feel so blessed and rewarded that I get to see it, because it has meant so much to me. And I know the power of, I don't know what was going on when Alice wrote this thing, but I know the power that it holds from the book to the Stevens version of the film, the original, and two major Broadway shows in 2005 and then again in 2015. There's something going on energetically with that Color Purple. And I know that for anybody who's involved with it, if you open yourself up to it, it changes you. One of the greatest highlights of my life is that Color Purple experience back in 85. And now to be blessed enough to have lived, to have come full circle, to see it again, to be able to literally pass it on, to pass it on to another generation, is just the greatest reward.