14 DAY TRIAL // Oprah Winfrey, aka Oprah, aka the Queen of Television, aka the Big O, covers the latest issue of The Hollywood Reporter, the Women in Entertainment issue, and, in the accompanying interview, she also touches on the topic of the sacrifices she had to make in her personal life to be her best at work.
Clearly, becoming the most powerful and successful woman in showbiz didn’t happen overnight and it clearly didn’t happen without Oprah making huge sacrifices. One of them was never having kids but, as she tells the publication, she’s OK with the idea now.
Not even Oprah believes you can have everything in life.
“If I had kids, my kids would hate me,” she says. “They would have ended up on the equivalent of the Oprah show talking about me; because something [in my life] would have had to suffer and it would’ve probably been them.”
Growing up, she could tell that she was simply not made for motherhood, because she had someone who was right there by her side, her BFF Gayle King.
“Gayle [now a mother of two] was the kind of kid who, in seventh grade home ec class, was writing down her name and the names of her children. While she was having those kind of daydreams, I was having daydreams about how I could be Martin Luther King,” Oprah explains.
However, even the female version of Martin Luther King has had her failures, and one of them was ending her show and starting her OWN network. Oprah has talked about this before, saying that she’d come to regret rushing into launching the network when she wasn’t ready but, for the record, she’s not saying that the project was a bad idea.
It was all a matter of bad timing, as they say. Still, it’s not like the difficulties she’s come across with OWN have damaged her career or reputation to such a great extent: they were just bumps in the road.
Without modesty and with typical honesty, Oprah says of her successor: “There won’t be a ‘next Oprah.’ Just like there won’t be another Barbara Walters, Aretha Franklin or Whitney Houston. People who make their mark in the way that they made it, that’s it.”
The full THR piece is available at the link in the first paragraph.