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Oprah Winfrey: Mary Tyler Moore Inspired Me to Have My Own Show

Mary Tyler Moore helped Oprah Winfrey make it after all. Hours after the TV icon passed away at age 80 January 25, Winfrey paid tribute to her in an interview with Entertainment Tonight. The 62-year-old news anchor turned talk show host revealed that Moore’s eponymous ’70s series about a single 30-something career woman at a Minneapolis TV station inspired her to create The Oprah Winfrey Show. Watch Moore and Winfrey together in her hit talk show above!

Praising her as a “role model” for “young, single women in the workforce,” Winfrey said Moore “first gave me the idea that you can own your own show and produce it. She was the one.”

Mary Tyler Moore
Mary Tyler Moore in 1976. CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images

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Winfrey, who launched OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network in 2011, added that Moore’s influence went beyond the story lines on her show, hailed by many as the first modern woman’s sitcom.

“When I say that she had a powerful influence on me, it wasn’t just being that iconic figure that was women in the workforce, doing the same job I was doing, working in news as a journalist, in a newsroom, and who was single and really OK with it. Every episode wasn’t about trying to find a man, it was about trying to find your way in life,” said Winfrey. “She paved the way through storytelling for women and was a value system for women without even knowing it. So, her legacy will live on.”

Oprah
Oprah Winfrey on ‘CBS This Morning’ on Jan. 3, 2017. John Paul Filo/CBS via Getty Images

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The billionaire media tycoon also opened up about the time Moore surprised her on air. “I went into double, triple overtime ugly cry,” Winfrey recalled of the moment, captured in the video above. “After that, I said, ‘Never again!’ I called all my producers together — and that was in 1997 — I said, ‘Never again will I be surprised on the show, and if I’m ever surprised on the show, it will cost whoever produced that show their job.’ Because I could not speak, hear or think!”

Moore laid the groundwork for more than just Winfrey’s show. In a January 26 Today show interview, Candice Bergen asserted her Emmy-winning sitcom Murphy Brown, about an investigative journalist and news anchor, wouldn’t have existed without Moore.

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“Mary Tyler Moore really opened the door for women not defined by a relationship, for women trying to have a career,” explained the actress, 70. “And it also opened the door to quality television, because the writing was so exceptional. … Mary was an icon unlike any other.” 

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