In Sunday night’s revelatory interview with Oprah Winfrey, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle revealed how billionaire filmmaker Tyler Perry swooped in to help the couple. Soon after they were told they would stop receiving security protection from the British royal family, Harry and Markle, who were in Canada at the time, started to panic about where they should go and where they would be safest. Perry offered not just one of his homes in southern California, but a full security detail. They stayed three months.
What few know though is how much Perry has also helped Winfrey. The former talk show host has long served as a mentor to Perry, who watched her show growing up and credits her with inspiring him to start writing. He first appeared on her show more than a decade later in 2001; backstage, she gave him a business lesson on the importance of “writing your own checks” and being fully in control.
While that advice was crucial in Perry’s future success, he has also been there for Winfrey. After ending her talkshow in 2011 and launching her own network OWN, Winfrey had a hard time. The new network didn’t have the immediate success some expected and was criticized in the press for its low viewership and a lack of direction.
“It was always described as ‘the struggling OWN network,’” Winfrey told Forbes in 2019 in an interview about Perry. “I was feeling very down about it, actually the most distraught I’ve ever been in my life.”
She was opining about it on the phone with her friend Perry, and he decided to take matters into his own hands, hopping on his private jet in Atlanta and flying out to Winfrey’s home in Santa Barbara.
“He knocked on my door and said, ‘I just want to see your face and make sure you’re okay,’” Winfrey recalled. “Then he turned around and went back home.”
He followed up on the kind visit with a gesture that would change the fate of OWN and make it anything but a struggling network: he offered to write the channel’s first scripted series.
“He said, ‘give me a minute.’ It was like a half hour, and he comes back with this idea for The Have and the Have Nots,” Winfrey said “He is prolific.”
Perry ended up writing many more series for the channel and penned an exclusive deal with the OWN that even saw him owning a piece of the network. His series for OWN, including The Have and the Have Nots and Love Thy Neighbor, became some of the channel’s top-rated programming.
When Perry finally left Winfrey’s network last year to launch a streaming service of his own with BET, Winfrey gave him her blessing. After all, she’d helped show him the way.
“She inspired me from day one,” he told Forbes. “Watching examples like Oprah, owning The Oprah Winfrey Show, and understanding what that meant. That was very, very important to me.”
Very important indeed—last year Perry joined Winfrey on the world’s billionaires list.
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March 08, 2021 at 11:42AM
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It’s Not Just Meghan Markle And Prince Harry. How Tyler Perry Came To Oprah’s Rescue - Forbes
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