This wig was simply the best.
Many stories about Tina Turner’s iconic life and style have emerged after the music legend died at the age of 83 on Wednesday, and it turns out Oprah Winfrey has quite the hair-raising tale.
The former “Oprah Winfrey Show” host, 69, was close friends with Turner and in a 2011 OWN interview, she shared the story behind her decision to don a Tina-inspired wig “at all times” and follow her idol on the 1997 “Wildest Dreams” tour.
“It was the ultimate groupie story,” Winfrey says in the re-surfaced YouTube clip, sharing that she decided to pack up her talk show “at great expense” and travel to different cities while attending Turner’s concerts.
“I had a wig made so I could be a part and close to Tina in wigdom,” she recalls. “And then I wouldn’t take the wig off.”
Clips of the media mogul wearing the short, shaggy hairpiece flash on the screen in the clip as Winfrey laughingly reveals, “I did it for the show, I did it for the next show, I think we did five or six shows around the country.”
She loved the wig so much that she “started wearing it on the weekends” and “to bed.”
“I started wearing it all times,” the TV personality says, adding that her longtime love Stedman Graham had to stage a bit of an intervention.
“One day Stedman came and said to me, ‘I don’t know when somebody’s gonna tell you,'” she shares, adding that he told her, “you are not Tina Turner.”
While Winfrey originally didn’t get what he was saying, Graham eventually told her, “it’s a problem. It’s become a problem. I think you think you’re Tina Turner.”
Although she ditched her tousled ‘do, the Turner fan admits she still thinks it’s fabulous.
“Truth of the matter is I still like my Tina wig,” Winfrey says in the clip. “If I had it right now I’d put it on. You know, I don’t feel like that was such a terrible thing to put on the Tina wig. Could I have a little happiness here? Could I just have a little moment?”
As for her friendship with the rock icon, Winfrey told CBS Mornings yesterday that she “was certainly aware that she was ill” but that during a 2019 trip to “visit her in the hospital,” Turner shared that “she was actually ready to go, meaning, ready to leave the planet.”
We’re sure Oprah will be paying tribute to the Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll for years to come.
