The Color Purple (1985) Oprah Winfrey was already a local Chicago talk show superstar when talent-search genius Quincy Jones (who also recognized something special in Michael Jackson and Will Smith, and they did pretty nicely) saw Winfrey on TV while in his Chi-town hotel room and cast her in Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1982 classic. Oprah led an all-star cast as the movie painfully scrapes over incest and domestic abuse-addled life of a poor, humble African-American woman in the early 1900s that starred Danny Glover, Whoopi Goldberg, Rae Dawn Chong and Margaret Avery and directed by Steven Spielberg.
