Celebrity Ancestry
The color "purple" figured into Oprah Winfrey's past more than a century before she co-starred in "The Color Purple." Winfrey's great-great-great-grandmother, born in 1839, was Violett Winfrey. Like the lead character in that landmark film, based on Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning story, she was born in the South. Winfrey recently produced a stage version of "The Color Purple," now on Broadway.
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