Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [119]
When she received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actress, followed by the Academy Award nomination in 1986, she was unstoppable. “I’ve got to act,” she told Good Housekeeping. “I’m a good interviewer largely because I taught myself how. But I was born to act.” She told Larry King on CNN that she was at her “out of my mind happiest” when performing. “I hear people say this about having children. When their babies just come out of the womb and stuff, but I have those moments when I am acting.”
She said she intended to make at least one film a year. In March 1988 she started her second movie, costarring with Geraldine Page, Elizabeth McGovern, and Matt Dillon in Native Son, based on the Richard Wright novel about a black man’s murderous rage. Oprah was cast as the mother who begs for mercy from the parents of the white girl her son has murdered. Her performance failed to impress critics. “She weighs in with an overload of bathos,” Julie Salamon wrote in The Wall Street Journal. Hal Erickson, in the online database AMG (All-Movie Guide), concurred: “Oprah’s excessive histrionics pale in comparison to her brilliant, well-modulated performance in The Color Purple.” Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times that “the film only seems dated when the performers, especially Oprah Winfrey, play for sentiment.”
Native Son flopped at the box office and was pulled two weeks after release, but Oprah rose above the withering reviews. “I should do a comedy,” she told the Chicago Tribune. When she was offered the role of the Manhattan cleaning lady in the film version of Truman Capote’s short story “A Day’s Work,” she decided she was becoming typecast as the heavyset, woebegone woman with a gray bun on her head and support hose rolled down her legs. She told the writer Robert Waldron she was offended by those who accused her of playing only Aunt Jemima characters. “At first I would be very kind,” she said. “Now I just want to slap them!” She told AdWeek, “I would like to do a character that has some sexuality. Like Dinah Washington, who was a great black singer who had seven different husbands and used to sexually exhaust her men.” Oprah didn’t want to play only black women who had problems. “It’s important for me to tell our stories, but I refuse to be limited to just that.”
Hearing her declarations about becoming a movie star, many assumed that King World would lose The Oprah Winfrey Show, its third-biggest moneymaker after Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy!, but the distributor was not worried. “Oprah is very ambitious,” said the chief financial officer, Jeffrey Epstein. “She wants to act in movies and TV shows, [but] there are not many great parts for black women. So she needs to produce shows herself, which cost a lot of money, and the best way to finance all that is to stick with her daytime job.” Oprah had recently paid Toni Morrison $1 million for the rights to film her Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, Beloved. “I didn’t even try to negotiate.… I just said, ‘Name your price,’ and I paid it.” She believed she had made a $1 million investment in putting her name in lights.
Except for rock stars, movie stars, professional athletes, and Wall Street marauders, few people make more money than a syndicated television talk show host with a number one–rated show carried in two hundred U.S. cities and sixty-four international markets. In her first year of syndication, Oprah made $31 million; in her second year she made $37 million; three years later, she made $55 million and landed in Forbes as the ninth-highest-paid entertainer in the world. The talk