"I THINK there is no life without a spiritual life, " Oprah Winfrey says, "and I think that, more and more, people are becoming aware of the spiritual dynamics of life. And, for me, that's about ?Why are you really here? What is your purpose really about? All the stuff that's going on, what does it really mean?'

"I think we've gotten lost in believing that things of the exterior - all the things that we acquire - matter more."

It has been a long day in Kansas City. We have had yoga instruction, and food from Oprah's personal chef. Naomi Wolf, one of America's literary heavyweights, has exhorted us all to think about the beauty myth, and we have been schooled in the principles of ageless living.

Suddenly, in the middle of a gospel number, Oprah bounds onto the stage to thunderous applause, and the audience rises as one to greet her. "Hi gorgeous, " she screams. The faithful are standing, rocking to the music and pumping the air, screaming for the Big O, and for the next hour she prances and preens, reading from Wayne Dyer and Deepak Chopra, telling us all to stand up and take charge of our lives.

It is into just such a scene that Dubliner Paul O'Brien is expected to walk one day very soon. O'Brien, the father of 15year-old Lynsey, who fell to her death from the Costa Magica cruise ship in the Caribbean in January, is expected on as part of his campaign to highlight the dangers and unregulated nature of cruise holidays. It's a subject to which Oprah has devoted time before. Thanks to her interest, a congressional hearing was opened into cruise ship safety last December. It still continues.

Such is Oprah's influence.

Winfrey, as everyone knows, is the first African-American billionaire; a woman who hosts a talkshow which is screened in 121 countries, founded a magazine which reaps $140m in revenue annually, owns a restaurant and large tracts of real estate in several countries, and who flies between them in her own jet.

But things have not always been so halcyon for America's Beloved. She came from grinding poverty, and suffered horrendous abuse which, she concedes, marked her. But, as she also makes clear, she refused to allow it to define her, or to break her spirit.

Born in 1954 in Kosciusko, a small agricultural community in Mississippi, Oprah's early years were spent on the move. Her mother, Vernita, who wanted to escape the poverty and prejudice of Mississippi, leapt onto a bus headed for Milwaukee, leaving her daughter on a farm with her grandmother, Hattie Mae, and her husband, Earless Lee, who was the first of many dark presences in her childhood.

"I feared him, " she says. "I remember him always throwing things at me, or trying to shoo me away with his cane. I lived in absolute terror of him. Our nearest neighbour was a blind man up the road. There weren't any other kids. No playmates and no toys, except for a corncob doll.

I played with the animals and spent most of my time reciting Bible stories to the cows. For me, it was looking out over a road that had no name, the outhouse, the chicken coop, even the stump in the front yard. I remember being afraid and climbing into my grandmother's lap during a lightning storm. I was frightened of the thunder and the lightning, and she would say, ?Be still, child.

God is doing His work.'" Reading became her solace, and when she became famous, she would found a book club, which would become a powerful force in publishing, generating millions in sales. "Books were my path to freedom, " she says. "I learned to read at the age of three, and soon discovered that there was a whole world to cover that went beyond our farm in Mississippi. Books showed me that there were possibilities in life, that there were actually people like me living in a world I could not only aspire to, but attain. That gave me hope. It was like an open door."

When she was six years old, her mother sent for her.

Financially secure with a job as a maid, and a boyfriend who promised to marry her, Vernita felt able to take care of her daughter, and for the next decade, Oprah would live with her mother. Things did not go well. Her mother regularly beat her daughter for being a "bookworm", and it was not the only abuse she suffered there.

When she was nine, her cousin raped her, as did her uncle in her teens. She fell pregnant - it is unclear by whom - and the baby lived "only a week or two", according to Winfrey.

It is clear that it has scarred her. "That experience was the most traumatic and emotional of my life, " she says. "Everybody in the family sort of shoved it under a rock. "I did a show with Truddi Chase, who was so traumatised by sexual and physical abuse that she divided into different selves, and in the midst of her telling her story, I started crying uncontrollably. I just could not stop. It was all my own stuff coming out.

"When I gathered the courage to tell my mother's side of the family what had happened, they criticized me for airing my dirty linen in public. They now want to pretend that our past did not happen. My mother said she didn't want to hear it, so I never brought it up again.

"But I never moved on. I was - and am - severely damaged by the experience. All the years that I convinced myself I was healed, I wasn't. I still carried the shame, and unconsciously I blamed myself for those men's acts.

Something deep within me feels I must have been a bad little girl for those men to have abused me."

Again to escape, she turned to books, and this time, the books she read opened a window on the suffering of her people, and in particular, the lives of Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman.

"Sojourner Truth was born into slavery, " she says. "Her name was Isabella Baumfree to begin with, but she ran away from her master, and she became a preacher, an abolitionist, and a feminist. She adopted the name, Sojourner Truth, to symbolise her life and her mission, which was to free the slaves - especially women - from the oppression that they were suffering.

"Harriet Tubman was born a generation later, and she, too, escaped to freedom by hiding during the day, and following the North Star at night. She returned to the south to help the underground railroad - which was a chain of safehouses stretching all the way from the south to Canada - and at grave danger, she made several trips into slave territory to rescue other slaves, including her parents, and shepherded them to freedom.

"During the civil war, she actually served in the Union army as a spy, and when she died just before the outbreak of the first world war, she was buried with full military honours. It was those two women, I decided, that I wanted to emulate most."

Oprah started touring churches and colleges with the gospel group Sweet Honey in the Rock, reciting Sojourner Truth's Ain't I A Woman? speech. When she went to a local DJ at WVOL Radio to ask him to sponsor her in a walkathon, he talked her into doing a demo tape, which he gave to the station manager, Clarence Kilcrese, who hired her to read news reports.

Soon after, she was invited to join a TV station in Nashville to read the news, and it was during that time that she started an affair with a married man. "I wasn't living with him, " she says, "but I thought I was worthless without him. The more he rejected me, the more I wanted him. I felt depleted; powerless. At the end, I was down on the floor grovelling and pleading with him."

She felt terrible, and put on weight.

"The reason I gained all that weight in the first place, and the reason I have such a sorry history of abusive relationships with men, was that I just needed approval so much. I needed everyone to like me, because I didn't like myself very much. So I'd wind up getting involved with these cruel selfabsorbed guys who'd tell me how selfish I was for wanting a career, or to find out who I really was, and. . . I'd be grateful to them because I had no sense that I deserved anything else, which is why I gained so much weight later on. It was the perfect way of cushioning against the world's disapproval."

Three years later, she was approached by WJZ-TV in Baltimore to co-anchor an hour-long newscast there.

But there were problems. She didn't read the news as it was written. Back in Nashville, she would see what was written on the teleprompter and instinctively use different words. It made her sound more conversational.

Nashville loved it. Baltimore, however, did not. Ordered to cover a house fire in which seven children had died, Winfrey was sent to interview the distraught mother. "It was not good for a news reporter to be out covering a fire and crying with a woman who had lost her home. It was very hard for me to, all of a sudden, become ?Ms Broadcast Journalist' and not feel things. How do you not worry about a woman who has lost seven children and everything she owned in a fire? How do you not cry about that?"

She was pulled off the air by the news director. "He told me that my eyes were too wide apart, my nose was too flat, my chin was too big, and my hair was too thick. I wondered why I'd been hired in the first place."

She was sent to a French beauty salon for a complete makeover. "They did something to my hair, and it made my scalp feel like it was on fire. I had a French perm, and all my hair fell out.

Every little strand. I was left there with three little squiggles in the front. There was no wig to fit my head. I had to walk around wearing scarves. All my selfesteem was gone. I cried constantly."

Fortunately for Winfrey, there was a changing of the guard and Bill Carter, the new station manager, decided to make her co-host of a new TV show, People Are Talking, in an effort to snare some of Phil Donahue's audience. No one believed it would work, but she consistently trounced Donahue in the ratings. "Everybody with the exception of my best friend told me it wouldn't work, " she says. "They all gave their reasons: I was black, female, overweight. They said Chicago was a racist city, and that the talkshow was on the way out. "But I'll tell you this. On my first day in Chicago, when I set foot in the city, I was walking down the street, and honey, it was like roots. It was like the motherland. I knew I belonged there."

A year later, Quincy Jones was in Chicago to testify on behalf of Michael Jackson in a lawsuit over the authorship of the song The Girl Is Mine. He had come to Chicago reluctantly, since he was working in LA co-producing a movie with Steven Spielberg based on Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Color Purple. As he moved around the hotel room eating his breakfast he began channel-surfing, finally settling on Oprah's show. But, as he later told the media, when her credit line came on the screen, Jones saw the word ?Sofia' not ?Oprah'. The role of Celie's stepdaughter had just been cast.

"The reason I took the role was that the character had such self-faith, " she says. "No matter how whipped and defeated a person feels, he or she can recover. They can still bounce back and become a winner. Self-faith transforms victims into winners, and empowers people to take charge of their lives and their destiny.

"Late in the story, the mayor's wife wants Sofia to come and work for her as a maid and she refuses, and the white men of the town beat her. After that, she is arrested and put in prison, and only released years later on condition that she becomes the mayor's maid. Now, I know you know what it's like on a film set. You sit there forever. Honey, you can knit a whole sweater waiting. Mine was the last angle to be shot, and I sat there for three days waiting for them to set it up. So, I had a lot of time to think about all the years Sofia spent in jail, and how thousands of men and women - all the people who marched at Selma - were thrown in jail and what those years, and that injustice, must have been like. So, Sofia finally speaking up and saying no was like a victory for me; for all of us.

"She represents a legacy of black women, and the bridges I've crossed to get where I am. To me, she's a combination of Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and all the other black women who have gone unsung and unnamed, but who represent a significant part of our history."

There was, however, a backlash within the black community, some of whom regarded it as black malebashing. Oprah snorts at the criticism when I mention it, pointing out that it is a film about black women, not black men. "I believe that people see what they want to see in a work of art. Or in anything, for that matter. When you see joy and beauty in something, it's because it's part of you. But when you see negative anger and fear in something, that's because it's part of you too. I'm tired of hearing about how it emasculated black men. I didn't hear anybody going on about domestic violence, about violence against women, or about sexual abuse of children in the home. That's the real emasculation."

To emphasise the point, Oprah powered a child abuse bill in memory of Angelica Mena, a five-year-old girl from Chicago who was raped, strangled and then dumped in Lake Michigan, even hiring a lawyer to draft a bill which would create a national database of child-abusers so that employers and landlords could access it. Originally attached to a bill for handgun control, of all things, it was spiked by lobbying from Charlton Heston and the National Rifle Association. President Clinton would finally ratify it in 1993.

Controversy erupted once again when guest, Howard Lyman, the programme director of the American Humane Society, went on her show to promote an ?Eating with Conscience' campaign. He described cattle-feeding procedures in the US, and said that they could lead to bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) or mad cow disease. When Lyman told Oprah that the risk was real, she replied: "That just stopped me cold from eating another hamburger." It sent beef and cattle prices into a downward spin, and cost the American cattle industry millions of dollars.

The Texas Beef Group, a group of cattle ranchers led by billionaire, Paul Engler, sued her, claiming that she had violated a Texan law which forbade people from "knowingly making false claims". They demanded $12m in damages. Winfrey defended the suit, and after a month-long trial, she was found innocent. "It was, " she says, "the most trying but also the most validating experience that I have had."

Winfrey has signed until 2008, though she is not much enamoured of the medium. "Television promotes false values, " she says. "What we dwell on is who we become, and as a woman thinks, so she is. If we absorb hour upon hour of images and messages that don't reflect our magnificence, it's no wonder we walk around feeling drained of our lifeforce. If we tune into dozens of acts of brutality each week, it shouldn't surprise us that our children see that as an acceptable way to resolve conflict. You have to become the change you want to see. Those are words that I live by."

I ask her what she felt her show offered people. "Every show I do tries to encourage self-esteem, " she says. "If you've got that, then you've got it all.

What we're trying to tackle is what I think is the root of all the problems in the world: lack of self-esteem. And it's what causes wars, because people who really love themselves don't go out and try to fight other people. It's the root of all our problems.

"I am an optimist because I believe in our possibilities as Creation's sons and daughters. I believe that every day you have the opportunity to create your life anew. Every day. . . I am only a pessimist when I look at how far I think we still have to go. I think that there is a need for a spiritual revolution - a revolution of true self-awareness - of people coming to understand the truth of who they really are, and the meaning behind that. We come to this planet really to do one thing, and that is to learn how to love. Love is it. It really is.

"You must seek it and encourage it in everyone, and then that gets rid of everything, because love is the ultimate truth."