Celebrity Mound

Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour had quite the request for Oprah Winfrey.

Wintour had told the talk show host to drop 20 pounds to be on the cover of the fashion magazine back in 1998, the editor revealed during an unaired segment from her 60 Minutes interview on Sunday.

“It was a very gentle suggestion,” she said, laughing. “I went to Chicago to visit Oprah, and I suggested that it might be an idea that she lose a little bit of weight.”

She added: “I said simply that you might feel more comfortable. She was a trooper!”

Winfrey, 55, must have listened to the fashion legend. She was featured on the cover from more than 10 years ago with the tagline: “Oprah! A Major Movie, An Amazing Makeover.”

“She totally welcomed the idea, and she went on a very stringent diet,” Wintour said. “And it was one of our most successful covers ever.”

In the 60 Minutes interview, Wintour, 59, also defended the use of Photoshop to make people “look their best.”

“That’s one of the things that makes me rather angry, that I don’t understand,” she said. “That if you look wonderful, does that make you less important? Less powerful? Less serious?”

Although Vogue typically only covers stick-thin models within its pages, she said her magazine maintains an awareness of obesity.

“I’d just been on a trip to Minnesota, where I can only kindly describe most of the people I saw as little houses,” Wintour said. “There’s such an epidemic of obesity in the United States, and for some reason, everybody focuses on anorexia.”

Wintour, who commissioned a feature on the topic complete with illustrations, said that it was an important issue.

“We need to spend money time and education on teaching people to eat, exercise and take care of themselves in a healthier way,” she said. “It [has gotten people] provoked, which is really the point.”

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Oprah Winfrey talked about courage, making wise choices and helping others during a commencement address Sunday at Duke University, which gave her an honorary degree.

During her 25-minute speech beneath overcast skies, the talk show host told the 4,400 graduates and their guests that “one of the best ways to enhance your own life is to enhance somebody else’s” and to “stand proudly in your own shoes while you help others stand in theirs.”

“How can I help somebody else move to higher ground? That is success. That’s it. That’s why we’re all alive,” she said.

She also emphasized the need to make wise choices daily, saying, “Each of us has to stand in our own shoes. Will you stand in them in humility and compassion and courage? Every day will give you a chance to make that choice.”

Duke President Richard H. Brodhead presented Winfrey with an honorary doctor of humane letters degree.

She also had a personal connection with the 2009 class at the Durham, N.C., school. Her godson, William Bumpus, son of her well-known friend, Gayle King, was among the graduates.

“Will never wants people to know he knows me,” Winfrey joked. “I’m like his crazy aunt that they let out at commencements.”

Preceding Winfrey was student speaker Robert Paul Jones, a 2002 graduate who returned to Duke to receive his medical degree. He teased her about her celebrity, and pretended to be interrupted by a cell phone call as he began his remarks.

“Ms. Winfrey, apparently your limousine is double-parked in front of the chapel,” Jones joked. “Duke Parking wanted me to let you know they won’t release your honorary degree until you pay your parking fine.”

Oprah Winfrey and First Lady Michelle Obama

Liv Tyler, Stella McCartney and Kate Hudson

Christine Teigen and John Legend (um where exactly is her hand?)

Oprah Winfrey and John Legend

Gayle King and Diane Sawyer

M.I.A. and Benjamin Brewer

Oprah Winfrey decided Monday to pull an already-taped episode of her talk show that was to mark the 10th anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre, saying it “focused too much on the killers.”

The episode, “10 Years Later: The Truth about Columbine,” was to air on the Monday anniversary of the massacre in Littleton, Colo., that killed 12 students and a teacher.

“I decided to pull the Columbine show today. After reviewing it, I thought it focused too much on the killers. Today, hold a thought for the Columbine community. This is a hard day for them,” Winfrey wrote on Oprah.com and her Facebook page. A similar message appeared on her Twitter feed.

A Harpo Productions Inc. spokeswoman confirmed the posts.

Columbine Task Force lead investigator Kate Battan, FBI special agent Dwayne Fuselier, Dave Cullen – author of the book “Columbine” – and Columbine High School principal Frank DeAngelis had taped the episode of “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”

Winfrey said a program about a mother released from prison would run in place of the Columbine piece.

Will Oprah Winfrey trade her seat as a talk show host for one on the United States Senate?

“Absolutely not,” she said Monday, after hearing that Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich considered appointing her to President Barack Obama’s now-vacant spot in the Senate.

“I would have said, ‘Where would I fit it in with my day job? My mid-day job, my night job, my radio job, my magazine job?’” Winfrey said to her friend Gayle King on King’s Sirius radio show.

During a visit to ABC’s Good Morning America to defend his innocence in connection with accusations he tried to auction off the open Senate seat, Blagojevich said he thought she would be a fitting replacement.

“She seemed to be someone who had helped Barack Obama in a significant way to become President,” he said.

Where was Winfrey when she heard the news?

“My plan was to get up and watch Good Morning America and work out and then I just thought, ‘Let me just lay here another half hour.’ If I had been watching, as I normally watch — from the treadmill, I would have fallen off the treadmill,” Winfrey said. “I’m pretty amused by the whole thing.”

Although Winfrey has no plans to go into politics, she does think she’s qualified.

“I think I could be Senator too,” the talk show host said on The Gayle King Show. “I’m just not interested.”

(source)