Oprah Winfrey — mogul, celebrity, philanthropist — admits to insecurities

Oprah Winfrey guides me into her office and, after a welcoming hug, anticipates where my eye is going to land first. In the corner, overlooking her Oprah Winfrey Network studio lot in West Hollywood, there’s artist Whitfield Lovell’s “Having,” a charcoal on wood panel image of two African American women, which has three wooden boxes of pennies placed in front of it.

“These women were early entrepreneurs,” Winfrey says. “I looked at this every day from my desk in Chicago to remind me and inspire me that, yes, it can be done.”

The spacious office contains scores of Emmys (not all of them) and shelves and shelves of books, many punctuated with framed photos of Winfrey with the likes of Barack Obama and Nelson Mandela. Everything here has a story, and Winfrey, a consummate teller of tales, will happily share them.

“You see that photograph of me and Madiba over there?” Winfrey asks, pointing to a picture of her and Mandela, and telling of the time she went to South Africa to help AIDS-stricken children for a project called Christmas Kindness. Once there, Winfrey, her hair braided, waited with a town mayor for Mandela to arrive via helicopter.

“I am so excited,” the mayor told her. “Nelson Mandela is coming, and he’s bringing Oprah Winfrey from America.” Winfrey looked at him, confused. “I’m already here,” she told him. “I’m Oprah.” The mayor looked at her. “You? You look like a girl from the village. Where is the Oprah we know?”

Winfrey laughs. But for her, it’s not just a story but a lesson. She finds lessons everywhere, absorbs them and then passes them on because she loves, “pontificating,” as she puts it. During our long, discursive conversation, Winfrey, 63, does just that — touching on her next movie, “A Wrinkle in Time,” made with her friend, Ava DuVernay, and other movies Winfrey has made or might one day make, as well as films dear to heart:

Q: You’ve acted in movies directed by Steven Spielberg and Jonathan Demme and Ava DuVernay…

A: I started with Spielberg, so I started pretty high in the food chain.

Q: And you’ve said that you were terrified every day he was going to fire you on “The Color Purple.”

A: I was terrified. There was another movie — was it “Mask”? — where somebody had recently been fired, and it had never occurred to me that you could be fired from a movie. But I did know that, if there was anybody who could be fired, it would be me because I didn’t know what I was doing. Period. My first day on set, and I am in the first scene, and I walk in and look directly into the camera and say my line. “Cut! Cut!” Steven …

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