Oprah Winfrey Opens Up About Turning 70, Gratitude and How The Color Purple 'Changed Everything' (Exclusive)

By any measure, Oprah Winfrey has accomplished enough in her lifetime to rest on her laurels until the end of time. But Winfrey — cultural icon, movie star, media mogul, billionaire — isn’t most people. 

"I will never be done until my last breath is done," she tells PEOPLE in this week’s cover story. "And whenever that happens it will be a peaceful breath."

As Winfrey nears her 70th birthday next month and celebrates the Christmas Day release of The Color Purple, a musical adaptation of the 1985 original film and Broadway show based on Alice Walker’s acclaimed novel, she takes stock of her remarkable journey. 

"Gratitude really is my religion," says Winfrey, whose breakout performance as Sofia in the 1985 Oscar-nominated classic "changed everything" for her. "It was a spiritual opening for me to see my life in a different way."

Winfrey begins and ends each day with "Thank you", the touchstone of a cherished practice in gratitude she recommends to everyone. "If you train yourself to do that, you walk through life feeling the abundance instead of the scarcity," she says. "Obviously, people will say, 'Yeah, well, that's easy for you to say, Oprah.' But I've been doing that forever."

For one, she appreciates daily how different her trajectory could have been — and never forgets where she came from. Had Winfrey stayed in Milwaukee beyond her teenage years with her mother Vernita Lee, she believes the odds of survival were grim. "I would have been trapped inside my own body, my own weight, my own pain," says Winfrey, whose early years were marked by abuse, poverty, and hopelessness. "I would have had an early death."

An unlikely alchemy of timing, talent and tenacity, and a life-changing move at age 14 to live with her father in Nashville, helped set her on an extraordinary path.

Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE's free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from juicy celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.

Global fame and hard-earned success, including 25 seasons of her ground-breaking eponymous talk show, would follow, but Winfrey never lost sight of her life-long purpose: to uplift others. "I still continue to rise, and I’m in a space now where my offering is to help other people to rise," she says. "The principle that is the underbelly, the cornerstone for how I operate in the world… Life is better when you share it."

While Winfrey has impacted countless lives over the decades, her legacy remains unfinished business. "I now know that what Maya Angelou told me when I came back from opening my school in South Africa and I was like, 'Oh, Maya, this school is going to be my greatest legacy, these girls.' And she said, 'You have no idea what your legacy's going to be... because your legacy is never one thing. Your legacy is every life you've touched'."

"She went on to say, it's everybody who ever watched a show and decided because of something you said, I'm going to go back to school. I'm going to leave my abusive husband. I'm going to stop hitting my child. I'm going to get a better bra. So when I think about the millions of people who heard something that opened up the aperture of hope, of yearning, of consciousness, just even a little bit, that's a life I touched. And you can't get better than that."

It was also the late poet and memoirist who offered a path of inspiration. "Maya Angelou wrote a poem for me called 'Continue,' which y'all can just Google," Winfrey says. "But one of the most important lines is, 'My wish for you is that you continue to astonish a mean world with your acts of kindness.' And that is what I intend to do."

For more about Winfrey and The Color Purple, pick up this week's issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday.

The Color Purple will be released in theaters on Dec. 25, 2023.