Oprah Winfreyis 65 — and the icon isn’t slowing down in her remarkable career.
The media mogul has never hidden her love of surprising people and handing out lavish gifts as she told PEOPLE in March 2018 when she recounted the new way she tipped her housekeeper.
“This made me so happy recently: People never leave money for the housekeepers in a hotel,” she said at the time. “I usually just leave the money on the pillow, but this time I put it all over the room: under the desk, on the counter with the M&Ms, in the shower.”
She added, “As I was leaving, I was like, ‘Somebody is going to be happy today, yes!'”
Giving back to friends or strangers is nothing new for the former talk show host, who became famous in part because of the gifts she would give her studio audience duringTheOprah WinfreyShow.
Oprah Winfrey.Fred Watkins/ABC via Getty
“Nothing makes me happier than to see other people in their purest moments of joy,” Winfrey shared. “Sometimes, honest to goodness, I’m just sitting around thinking, ‘What could I do to make somebody feel really good today?'”
She continued, “To be able to do that for somebody, that’s one of the great joys of my life.”
Another joy in her life? TheOprah WinfreyLeadership Academy for Girls in South Africa where she is simply Mom O.
“They are my greatest, deepest joy,” Winfrey told PEOPLE recently. Opened in 2007, OWLAG, as it’s called, is a boarding school for young girls who have “been in the heart and heat of poverty.”
She added, “I wanted to build a school for girls who are like me.”
Winfrey was born in 1954 in Mississippi to her mother Vernita Lee, who was a teenager at the time, and Vernon Winfrey.
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Lee passed away on Thanksgiving Day at her home in Milwaukee at the age of 83. Winfrey told PEOPLE, “I knew my mother was dying” and found that music gave her the “opening to say what I needed to say” before her mother died.
source: people.com
