Trivia: Oprah Winfrey rose from poverty and a troubled youth to become the most powerful and influential woman in television and, according to Forbes Magazine, the world's most highly paid entertainer. Though primarily recognized as a talk show hostess, Winfrey also produces and occasionally acts in television movies and feature films. Winfrey's parents, who never married, were teens when she was born in rural Mississippi. She was originally named Orpah after a woman from the Book of Ruth but a spelling mistake on the birth certificate changed it to Oprah. She spent her childhood growing up in abject poverty on her deeply religious grandmother's farm. When she was older, Winfrey moved in with her mother in Milwaukee, WI. This proved a difficult time as Winfrey alleges she was repeatedly sexually molested by male relatives. Winfrey became a bit of a wild child during her early teens, experimenting with sex and drugs until the age of 14 when she gave birth to a premature baby. It died shortly after, and upon recovering, Winfrey chose to live with her father in Nashville. It was under his stern guidance that Winfrey found discipline, stability, and the inspiration to excel in school and change her life. When she was 19, Winfrey became a part-time radio reporter for station WVOL, Nashville, and also began studying speech and performing arts at Tennessee State University. She dropped out in 1972 during her sophomore year to become an anchor at Nashville's WTVF-TV. She was the first black woman to hold that position. In 1976, she moved to WJZ-TV and after a stint as a reporter was promoted to co-anchor. Two years after her arrival, Winfrey was slotted (with some trepidation by producers who weren't sure how audiences would respond to a host who was neither white nor thin) to host their talk show People Are Talking. Their worries were unfounded for the charming, empathetic Winfrey's show was a hit and remained so for eight years. In 1984, Winfrey took a major risk and accepted a job hosting a Chicago morning talk show, one that aired at the same time as the nationally top-rated, Chicago-based Phil Donahue talk show. This time it was her fears that had no basis for she soon found herself neck and neck in the ratings with Donahue. Her show also went nationwide through King World Syndicate and as she expanded the operation, the money began rolling in. With the purchase of a large downtown production facility, Winfrey was able to become the third woman in the American entertainment industry -- after Mary Pickford and Lucille Ball -- to own her own studio. She named it Harpo, which is, of course, "Oprah" spelled backwards. Using her considerable business acumen, Winfrey translated her show into a multi-million-dollar business, making her the wealthiest black woman in the U.S. Her show was groundbreaking for several reasons, but most of all because Oprah was unafraid to bare her soul and her own past experiences in front of audiences whereas most talk show hosts remained reserved in regard to their personal lives. Though it was difficult, she made public her past abuse, her drug problem during her twenties, and her struggle with obesity. In this latter area, Oprah, took a lot of heat from unkind critics who were unable to cope with the notion that a round woman could possibly be considered attractive, intelligent, and vital. She endured cruel jokes and jibes until she finally decided to lose weight, first with a radical liquid diet -- which only temporarily took off her weight -- and then with a rigorous fat-free diet and exercise regimen that kept her weight off. Like Donahue and the other talk show hosts of the day, Winfrey's program tended toward sensationalism designed to appeal to our most morbid curiosities. Subject-wise, she had begun hitting all-time lows by 1994. That year, she was to turn 40 and was thinking heavily about which direction her life might turn, both professionally and personally. There was a question whether or not she would even continue taping the show. She ultimately decided to stay on the air, but only after publicly promising to move her show to a higher, more uplifting level.In addition to her reign as "queen of the daytime talk shows," Winfrey has also proven herself a gifted actress. In 1985, she received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress with her film debut as Sofia in Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple. Later, she began working behind the scenes, executive producing and starring in Donna Deitch's acclaimed 1989 television movie The Women of Brewster Place, which later became a short-lived series.After the success of her book club, Winfrey began producing popular films based on some of her favorite contemporary written works. Along with executive-producing made-for-television adaptations such as David and Lisa, Tuesdays with Morrie, and Oprah Winfrey Presents: The Wedding, she served as producer on the 1998 big-screen adaptation of Toni Morrison's Beloved, a film she also costarred in.Winfrey continued to be a powerful force in the world of day-time television in 2003, when she spun off a regular segment from her show featuring psychologist Dr. Phil McGraw into McGraw's own daily program, Dr. Phil. Oprah founded a television channel (OWN -- Oprah Winfrey Network) after the final episode of the Oprah Winfrey show aired on May 5th, 2011.

Trivia: Family moved to New York City's Harlem when she was 9. At 14, she landed the role of the King in an all-girls production of The King and I. Taught American History at Brooklyn Technical High School for two years. In 1987, became the first African-American to win an Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series. Filmed a pilot for her own series, Jackee, following her success on 227; the pilot was never picked up, but aired as an episode of 227. In a 2013 episode of Celebrity Ghost Stories, she claims that when she was a child, the spirit of her late uncle saved her from an attack by a home invader.

Trivia: African American leading lady Lynn Whitfield made her film bow in 1983's Dr. Detroit. Three years later, the Louisiana born and bred Whitfield played the title character in the fact-based TV movie Johnnie Mae Gibson: FBI, the story of the first black female FBI agent. After gaining recognition for her work in a number of TV dramas, including The Women of Brewster Place (1990), Whitfield won an Emmy award and international acclaim for her starring performance in the HBO biopic The Josephine Baker Story in 1991. Whitfield subsequently split her efforts between TV and film, doing particularly strong work in Kasi Lemmons' much-feted Eve's Bayou (1997) as a family matriarch struggling with her husband's infidelity. In 1999, she earned an NAACP Image Award nomination for her work in Oprah Winfrey Presents: The Wedding, a 1950s drama in which she was cast as the wealthy mother of a young woman (Halle Berry) intent on marrying a poor white musician.

Trivia: Tall, elegant African American musical performer Paula Kelly was the daughter of a popular nightclub and band singer of the same name; the elder Paula Kelly had been instrumental in popularizing such 1930s and 1940s standards as "Jeepers Creepers" and "Chattanooga Choo Choo." The younger Kelly launched her own career in the early 1960s. In 1969 she made her first film, re-creating her Broadway role as dance-hall girl Helene in Sweet Charity. Kelly's later films ranged from the excellent (The Andromeda Strain) to the barely tolerable (Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life is Calling). Extremely active on series TV, Paula Kelly has played such roles as public defender Liz Williams on Night Court (1984), Theresa in The Women of Brewster Place (the 1989 pilot for Oprah Winfrey's abortive weekly) and Sweets in South Central (1994).

Trivia: Born in Mississippi, Mary Alice is a prolific actress on stage and television who is underutilized in feature films. She got her start with the Negro Ensemble Company and worked off-Broadway for several years. Her theater credits include The Vagina Monologues, A Raisin in the Sun, and Richard III. She received a Tony for her work in Fences and she appeared on Broadway in 1995 in Having Our Say: The Delaney Sisters' First 100 Years.Alice may be more widely known for her guest appearances on television during the '70s and '80s on shows like Sanford and Son, Good Times, The Cosby Show, and A Different World. She was also featured on the star-studded TV movie The Women of Brewster Place, directed by Donna Deitch, and the HBO miniseries Laurel Avenue, directed by Carl Franklin. She eventually won an Emmy for her work on I'll Fly Away. On the big screen, her breakthrough role came in 1990 with Charles Burnett's psychological drama To Sleep With Anger. She played Gideon's wife, Suzie, who is initially suspicious of the sinister Harry, played by Danny Glover. In the late '90s, Alice found some roles in independent films like Maya Angelou's Down in the Delta and Chi Moui Lo's Catfish in Black Bean Sauce. Well into her sixties, she started to play many estranged mothers. She was Alfre Woodard's mother in The Wishing Tree, Harold Perrineau Jr.'s mother on the HBO series Oz, and Angela Bassett's mother in John Sayles' ensemble film Sunshine State. In 2003, Mary Alice joined up with the Wachowski brothers to take over for the late Gloria Foster (her Having Our Say co-star) as The Oracle in The Matrix Revolutions.

Trivia: A black supporting actress, Olivia Cole studied acting at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, going on to appear onstage. She worked for nearly five years on the TV soap opera Guiding Light, and appeared on episodes of various prime-time TV shows. Cole came to prominence as Chicken George's wife Matilda in the historical TV mini-series Roots a role for which she won the 1976/77 Emmy for "Best Supporting Actress (Single Performance) in a Drama Series." She played supporting roles in a number of films, and occasionally played leads, as in Backstairs at the White House (1979); most of her work has been on TV.

Trivia: One of America's most respected dramatic actresses, Cicely Tyson has worked steadily as a television, film, and stage actress since making her stage debut in a Harlem YMCA production of Dark of the Moon in the 1950s. The daughter of Caribbean immigrants, Tyson was raised in Harlem. After working as a secretary and a successful model, she became an actress, landed her first jobs in off-Broadway productions, and eventually made it to the Great White Way in the late '50s.Tyson got her first real break in 1963, playing a secretary to George C. Scott on the TV series East Side/West Side, and in 1966 signed on with the daytime soap The Guiding Light. That same year, she made her credited screen debut starring opposite Sammy Davis Jr. in the drama A Man Called Adam (her first uncredited film role was in 1959's Odds Against Tomorrow). More film, television, and stage work followed, but Tyson did not truly become a star until her Oscar-nominated performance in the Depression drama Sounder (1972). An unusual beauty with delicate features, expressive black eyes, and a full, wide mouth, Tyson next hid her good looks beneath layers of old-age makeup to convincingly portray a 110-year-old former slave who tells her extraordinary life story in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974). A well-wrought effort, it won Tyson her first Emmy for her title role, which required her to age 91 years on the screen. Tyson subsequently had great success on television, particularly with her role in the legendary miniseries Roots (1977) and her work in The Women of Brewster Place (1989). She also continued to do a fair amount of film work, appearing in films like Fried Green Tomatoes (1991), The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (1994), The Grass Harp (1995), and Hoodlum (1997). In 1997, Tyson again donned old woman's makeup to offer a delightfully crotchety version of Charles Dickens' Scrooge in the 1997 USA Network original production Ms. Scrooge. Two years later, she had another television success -- and another Emmy nomination -- with A Lesson Before Dying, a drama set in the 1940s about a black man sentenced to death for a murder he did not commit. Tyson was later featured in a trio of popular Tyler Perry movies, including Diary of a Mad Black Woman (2005), Madea's Family Reunion (2006) and Why Did I Get Married Too? (2010). She also had a small, but pivotal, role in 2011's Oscar-nominated The Help, as Contstantine, the loving and elderly maid of Skeeter Phelan (Emma Stone).

Trivia: African American model/actress Robin Givens first gained national prominence as a regular on the TV series Head of the Class. From 1986 through 1991, Robin played Darlene Merriman, a prep-school type attending a high school honors program. Though she was but one of an ensemble, Givens's participation in the series was hyped by the network on the occasion of her marriage to boxing champ Mike Tyson. The marriage ended in divorce, after only a few years, amidst accusations of brutality and infidelity. Givens has proven she is not merely an adjunct to Mike Tyson's fame with excellent performances in such TV and movie projects as The Women of Brewster Place (1989) and A Rage in Harlem (1991), and the TV series Courthouse. Givens would remain active on screen over the coming decades, starring on other series, like Sparks, and in movies like Head of State and The Family That Preys.

Trivia: From stage to screen to recording studios, Lonette McKee has worked as both an actress and vocalist. Although actors who also sing have been a dime a dozen since the earliest days of stage and cinema, McKee's groundbreaking performance as the first African-American actress to portray the character of Julie in a major American production of Show Boat would have earned her a place in entertainment history even if she hadn't gone on to earn Image Award nominations for her roles in To Dance With Olivia (1997) and As the World Turns. A Motor City native, McKee kicked off her career in the entertainment industry when she became a recording artist in her hometown as a young teen, releasing an album on the Detroit-based Sussex label before being drawn to the screen in the mid-'70s. Cast in a key role in the 1976 musical drama Sparkle, McKee made an impression as a drug-addicted singer in a Supremes-like band, and she quickly caught the eye of casting agents. Appearing in such features as The Cotton Club and Brewster's Millions during the '80s, it was also during this period that she essayed her Tony-nominated role in Show Boat. Spike Lee later cast her in three of his films during the '90s: Jungle Fever, Malcolm X, and He Got Game. After being voted one of People magazine's "50 Most Beautiful People in the World" in 1995, McKee began a two-year stint on the soap opera As the World Turns. She also returned to the studio in 1992 to record Natural Love, her first album in nearly 20 years. The actress alternated between film and television in the early 2000s with parts in Men of Honor (2001), Honey (2003), and a recurring role in the NBC series Third Watch. McKee is married to a New York social worker and is the sister of dancer/actress Kathrine McKee.

Trivia: Dynamic African-American actor Moses Gunn was one of the founders of the Negro Ensemble Company. Educated at Tennessee State and the University of Kansas, Gunn made his first New York appearance in a 1961 production of Measure for Measure; he remained active on the off-Broadway scene throughout his career, winning several Obie awards. His 1962 Broadway debut came by way of Jean Genet's The Blacks, which served to introduce many of the powerful black acting talents of the era. In films dating from 1964's Nothing But a Man, Gunn is best-remembered for his portrayal of gangster Bumpy Jonas in the first two Shaft films, and for his brief but telling cameo as Booker T. Washington in Ragtime, a performance which won him an NAACP Image award. On series television, Gunn was top-billed as Jebediah Nightlinger in The Cowboys (1972), played boxing trainer George Beifus in The Contender (1980), was featured as miner Moses Gage in Father Murphy (1981-84) and chewed the scenery as the epigrammatical "Old Man" in A Man Called Hawk (1989). He also played Carl Dixon, the man who married Florida Evans (Esther Rolle) after a whirlwind courtship during the 1976-77 season of Good Times. In 1977, Moses Gunn received an Emmy nomination for his appearance as tribal chieftain Kintango in the groundbreaking miniseries Roots.

Trivia: Black supporting actor, onscreen from the '80s.

Trivia: Before he inaugurated his professional career, African-American actor Paul Winfield received a well-rounded education: He trained at the University of Portland, Los Angeles City College, Stanford, U.C.L.A., the University of Hawaii, and the University of Santa Barbara. After stage work, Winfield received his first major Hollywood break as Paul Cameron on the TV sitcom Julia (1968-1971). In films from 1969, he received an Academy Award nomination for his portrayal of a fiercely proud sharecropper in Sounder (1972). Back on the small screen, he earned Emmy nominations for his interpretation of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1978 miniseries King and his work as Dr. Huguley in 1979's Roots: The Next Generation. An indispensable purveyor of authoritative roles, he has played several judges, winning a 1994 Emmy for his performance in this capacity on TV's Picket Fences. Paul Winfield has also been seen on a regular basis in three television series, playing Julian C. Barlow in the 1989-1990 episodes of 227, Isaac Tuhle in Wiseguy (1987-1991), and a no-nonsense Magic Mirror (voice only) in the 1987 Cinderella spoof The Charmings. In 2004, not long after playing a small role in a remake of Sounder, Winfield suffered a heart attack and passed away at the age of 62.

Trivia: Discovered acting at age 13; at 15 won a scholarship to study at the famed Inner City Acting Academy in Los Angeles. Was the first African American to be ranked as the No. 1 college speaker in the nation (for two consecutive years); led USC Trojan Debate Squad to a national championship. In 1987 founded the Young Foundation to help youth achieve success; reorganized in 2000 as the Young Center for Academic and Cultural Enrichment to focus on youth leadership training. Was named an Ambassador of Goodwill by President Bill Clinton. Was an adjunct professor of English and Dramatic Arts at Woodbury University. Was inducted into the African American Hall of Education. Is the recipient of several distinguished awards, including the Ford Foundation Freedom Unsung Award, NAACP Social Achievement Award, President's Icon Award, and Man of the Year Award from the National Organization of Women at Work. Best known as Brandy Norwood's father, Frank Mitchell, on Moesha. Is a sought after motivational speaker.

Trivia: Known to many simply as Leon, Leon Robinson began his career in the early '80s, making several small appearances in various projects like the mini-series The Women of Brewster Place and the Tom Cruise movie All the Right Moves. He would continue to make memorable supporting appearances over the course of his career, with unique roles like soldier Killer Bee in the civil war drama Colors, and the statue of a saint that comes to life in the controversial music video for the Madonna song "Like a Prayer." Leon kept this up throughout the 2000s, as well, showing up everywhere from the acclaimed series Oz to the 50 Cent movie Get Rich or Die Tryin'.

Trivia: The son of actress Nan Kelly Yorke, Jack Kelly was the younger brother of stage and film star Nancy Kelly. Like Nancy, Jack was a professional from an early age, acting in radio and on stage before the age of 10, and in films from 1937 (he is quite prominent in a brace of 1939 20th Century-Fox films, Young Mr. Lincoln and The Story of Alexander Graham Bell). He reemerged as a leading man in the early 1950s, appearing in such films as Forbidden Planet (1956, as the ill-fated Lieutenant Farnam). Signed by Warner Bros. in 1955, Kelly starred as Dr. Paris Mitchell in the weekly TV version of the 1942 film King's Row. He went on to play gamblin' man Bart Maverick on the longer-running Warners western series Maverick. Though his popularity never matched that of his co-star James Garner, Kelly still developed a fan following as Bart; he remained with the series from 1957 until its cancellation in 1962, appearing opposite such Garner successors as Roger Moore and Robert Colbert. Kelly dabbled in a little bit of everything after that: hosting the anthology series NBC Comedy Playhouse (1973), emceeing the game show Sale of the Century (1969-71), and playing hard-nosed Lt. Ryan on the Teresa Graves series Get Christie Love (1974) and Harry Hammond on The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries (1977-79). He revived the Bart Maverick character on 1978's The New Maverick and the 1990 TV movie The Gambler Returns: Luck of the Draw. Chances are that, had he lived, Jack Kelly would have been invited to co-star again with Garner in the 1994 Mel Gibson theatrical-feature version of Maverick.

Trivia: The daughter of noted singer/actor Harry Belafonte, Shari Belafonte-Harper made her feature-film debut in If You Could See What I Hear and worked steadily in television and feature films through the mid-'90s.

Trivia: Dreadlocked character actor Glenn Plummer began his acting career on television during the late '80s. He appeared in the TV movies The Women of Brewster Place, Heat Wave, and Deadlock. On the big screen, he played thug High Top in Dennis Hopper's crime drama Colors and rookie pitcher Tyrone in the baseball movie Pastime. In 1992, he landed his first starring role as an ex-convict father who wants the best for his son in Steve Anderson's compelling drama South Central. After supporting roles in Trespass, Menace II Society, and Speed, he made a brief return to television to play staff member Timmy Rawlins during the first season of ER. Back on the big screen, he played a choreographer in Showgirls, a musician/activist in Strange Days, and drama teacher in The Substitute More feature films followed, he landed a spot on the HBO miniseries The Corner, and he tried producing with Love Beat the Hell Outta Me. In addition to several straight-to-video action thrillers, Plummer appeared in the feature film The Salton Sea. He also had starring roles in the independent drama 100 Kilos and the motorcycle movie Road Kings.