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Hollywood’s Top Earning Women

posted by Women & Hollywood
Thursday, August 6, 2009 at 11:51am CDT

Forbes has put together its first ever list on the top earning Hollywood women, and not surprisingly to me, half the top earners are over 40.

(PS this list is different from the list of highest earning women celebrities which came out earlier)

The list:

Number 1: Oprah Winfrey $275 million

Number 2: Madonna $110 million

Number 3: Celine Dion $100 million

Number 4: Beyonce $87 million

Number 5: Stephenie Meyer $50 million

Number 6: Judge Judy $45 million

Number 7 (tie): Britney Spears $35 million

Number 7 (tie): Ellen Degeneres $35 million

Number 9: Tyra Banks $30 million

Number 10: Angelina Jolie $27 million

It’s so great that there are three women of color on the list.

Here how the list was compiled:

To compile the list of Hollywood’s 15 best-paid women, we looked at the top-earning actresses, writers, musicians and talking heads in the industry. We then talked to managers, agents and other Hollywood insiders to come up with estimates of their earnings between June 2008 and June 2009. For the sake of this list, we did not include musicians who perform in a group. So although the country band Sugarland earned $14 million, lead singer Jennifer Nettles could not be considered for the list.