Oprah Winfrey is looking back on a private Whitney Houston moment that her studio audience kept quiet for years.
During a Cannes Lions appearance on Tuesday, June 23, Winfrey said Houston once fell off the stage while performing on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Winfrey said she immediately worried that the story would devastate Houston if photos or video reached the press.
Entertainment Weekly reported that the incident happened during Houston’s final appearance on Winfrey’s talk show in 2009, when she performed “I Didn’t Know My Own Strength” from her final studio album, I Look to You.
Winfrey told the Cannes Lions audience that Houston had relapsed by the time she came out to sing. The 2009 appearance was part of Houston’s attempt to reintroduce herself to viewers after years of public scrutiny around her voice, marriage and addiction struggles.
Winfrey Said Houston Fell During Her Final Oprah Appearance
Winfrey said she had spoken with Houston privately before the televised interview and believed the singer was in a stronger place then. “The first interview I did with her when we’d gone behind stage and I asked about her intentions, she was clean,” Winfrey said, according to Entertainment Weekly.
That changed when Houston returned to perform. “But the day she came to my show to perform in front of the audience, she was not, and she fell off of the stage,” Winfrey said.
The performance was tied to Houston’s comeback album I Look to You. Entertainment Weekly noted that the Oprah appearance helped push the album back up the Billboard 200 after the broadcast.
Oprah Asked the Audience Not to Share Photos
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Winfrey said audience members had cameras, but she pleaded with them not to release any images from the fall. “I knew that if that story got out that she’d fallen off the stage, that she would be completely destroyed by that,” Winfrey said, according to Entertainment Weekly.
She said the audience honored the request. “Even though the audience was there and the audience had cameras, I begged them not to put those pictures up because it would ruin her life, and they did not,” Winfrey said.
Winfrey connected the moment to the relationship she had built with her studio audience over years of tapings. She also said she does not think the same kind of privacy would hold in today’s social-media climate.
The Performance Became Part of Houston’s Comeback Chapter
Houston’s 2009 Oprah appearance was one of the biggest television moments around I Look to You. The song “I Didn’t Know My Own Strength,” written by Diane Warren, was framed at the time around survival and resilience, and the performance became one of the most remembered pieces of that promotional run.
The official Whitney Houston site lists the Oprah performance as part of Houston’s video archive. Entertainment Weekly reported that the performance came during a two-part appearance on Winfrey’s show.