Oprah Winfrey Recalls The Stunning Words Joan Rivers Said On Her First ‘Tonight Show’ Appearance: “I Don’t Know What To Do With That”

Oprah Winfrey is looking back on an uncomfortable public interaction with the late Joan Rivers .

Winfrey, who at the time was waiting to hear back about The Color Purple and thought that she had been snubbed due to her weight, said during a recent interview on The Jamie Kern Lima Show that she was “ shamed on The Tonight Show ” by the late Fashion Police host in 1985, per People . This also marked Winfrey’s “first appearance” on the famous late night show.

“They pre-interview you before, so we’re supposed to be talking about the great success of this little talk show in Chicago that’s beating Phil Donahue ,” she recalled, referring to A.M. Chicago . “And Joan Rivers turns to me and she says, ‘Tell me, why are you so fat?’ On national television. And I don’t know what to do with that. I just am like, ‘Uh, well I just love potato chips, Joan.'”

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Winfrey recalled that Rivers told her, “shame on you,” and that she even “agreed” with her.

“She says, ‘I’ll let you come back if you lose 15 pounds,'” Winfrey recalled. “‘You need to lose 15 pounds,’ she says to me on national television. And I accept it. I accept that I should be shamed because how dare me, be sitting up here on The Tonight Show .”

Winfrey added that she “had agreed that [she] was going away and lose 15 pounds.”

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“And of course I didn’t lose the 15 pounds,” she added. “I went and ate my way to another 10 pounds.”

This led Winfrey to attend a “health retreat,” which she said was called a “fat farm” at the time. While there, she got a call from director Steven Spielberg , who told her, “‘I hear you’re at a fat farm. You lose a pound, you could lose this part.'”

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“The face that it happened in the instant, the instant I’d know I let it go, was the greatest life lesson I have ever received,” she shared, “because I physically felt the release and I saw that the second I did that, it changed.”

Winfrey said this insight “became [her] grounding teaching for the rest of [her] life and career.”

“Do everything you can, work as hard as yo can, and then let it go,” she noted.

During a December 2023 appearance on The Drew Barrymore Show , Winfrey, who “had never done a film” prior to The Color Purple , recalled Spielberg yelling at her on set for accidentally breaking the fourth wall.

“Steven yells, ‘Cut! Cut! Cut! What are you doing?’ [I said], ‘Uh. I was just doing my lines,’” she remembered. “He said, ‘What are you doing looking in the camera?’ I go, ‘I’m not supposed to look in the camera?’ He goes, ‘No! Ms. Celie’s over here !'”

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