Oprah Winfrey acts rarely and nearly always plays the same woman: large, unafraid, and about to pay for it. What she has is presence rather than technique, and in the right supporting part, with the right director, presence is enough.
Fi1m perspective
Watch what Oprah Winfrey does with a yard. Sofia arrives at Harpo's place in The Color Purple (1985) to marry him, and before she has said much of anything she has taken possession of the ground, the porch and everyone standing on either. Winfrey plays her big, loud and without fear, and that is the performance most people still mean when they talk about her acting. Steven Spielberg's film is softer than the book and cuts to slapstick whenever the pain gets close; Winfrey does not. The film is never sharper than when it lets us see what the world does to a Black woman who refuses to lower her eyes, and it is Winfrey who makes us look.
It was her first screen part, and acting has stayed a sideline to hosting and producing ever since. The roles that followed are few and they rhyme: Sethe in Beloved (1998), which she also produced; Gloria Gaines, the butler's wife, in Lee Daniels' The Butler (2013); Annie Lee Cooper in Ava DuVernay's Selma (2014), again as producer; Mattie Michael in the television miniseries The Women of Brewster Place (1989); Deborah Lacks in the 2017 television film The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Resilient, outspoken Black women in historical and literary adaptations, nearly every one. She has chosen the same woman over and over, and we suspect she knows it.
What she brings is presence, which is not a small thing and is not the same as craft. She has said herself that she has not had the training and that "every time I do it there is a level of anxiety and fear that I have to wrestle with", and the admission is useful because it names both the strength and the limit. In a supporting part, as Gloria Gaines, she can put the public Oprah away and be a wife in a kitchen without vanity. Asked to carry a whole film in Beloved, the emotional register is harder to hold, and a face that has been a talk-show host's for decades has a way of turning back into itself in the frame.
Our own feeling is plain. There is a scene later in The Color Purple, which we will not describe, where what has been done to Sofia shows in her face and nowhere else, and it shook us more than anything else in that handsome, cautious film. The volume goes; the eyes stay. That is acting, whatever she says about training.
She works seldom and she works with directors who know what to do with her: Spielberg, Daniels, DuVernay. Start with Sofia. If you want to know whether she is an actor rather than a famous woman who acts, that yard settles it in under a minute.
Biography
Oprah Winfrey is an American actress. She made her feature film debut in The Color Purple (1985) as Sofia, for which she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.
Winfrey has appeared in other films including The Butler (2013) as Gloria Gaines and Selma (2014) as Annie Lee Cooper. She has also provided voice performances in animated features such as Bee Movie (2007) and The Princess and the Frog (2009).
