Los Angeles, California - Oprah Winfrey said The Color Purple helped her cope with the trauma of being raped when she was a young girl as the star introduced a new film based on Alice Walker's acclaimed novel Thursday.

The musical is the second big-screen adaptation, after Steven Spielberg's 1985 drama, and again portrays the hardships and sexual abuse faced by Black women in the South during the early 20th century.

"From the very first time I read The Color Purple it was a blessing in my life – because until that time I didn't know that there was language for what had happened to me," Winfrey said after a screening in Los Angeles.

"I had been raped and had a child at 14, who later died, and I did not have any language to explain what that was."

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"That book was the first time that there was a story about me."

The Color Purple tells the coming-of-age story of Celie, a Black girl living in rural Georgia who is raped by her father and forced to give away two children.

As it unfolds, Celie is forced into an abusive marriage, but comes to bond with and find strength from other women dealing with their own various traumas and prejudice.

Winfrey recalled how, in the 1980s, when it emerged Spielberg was adapting the film, she had "literally prayed on my knees every night for the opportunity to be in that movie."

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Spotted on her TV talk show by musician Quincy Jones, who was producing the film, Winfrey was cast as Sofia, a strong and feisty woman who encounters racism and tragedy.

She was eventually Oscar-nominated, and told Thursday's audience that the movie "changed my life," and to now be producing a remake meant life had "come so full circle."

The new movie, directed by Blitz Bazawule and starring Danielle Brooks, Fantasia Barrino, and Taraji P. Henson, will be released by Warner Bros. in theaters on Christmas Day.