Barbara Joan "Barbra" Streisand (/ˈstraɪsænd/; born April 24, 1942) is an American singer, songwriter, actress, and filmmaker. In a career spanning six decades, she has achieved success in multiple fields of entertainment and has been recognized with two Academy Awards,[1] ten Grammy Awards including the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and the Grammy Legend Award,[2] five Emmy Awards including one Daytime Emmy,[3] a Special Tony Award, an American Film Institute award, a Kennedy Center Honors prize,[4] four Peabody Awards,[5] the Presidential Medal of Freedom,[6] and nine Golden Globes.[7] She is among a small group of entertainers who have been honored with an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony Award–though only three were competitive awards–and is one of only two artists in that group who have also won a Peabody.[8]

After beginning a successful recording career in the 1960s, Streisand ventured into film by the end of that decade. She starred in the critically acclaimed Funny Girl, for which she won the Academy Award and Golden Globe Award for Best Actress.[9] Her other films include The Owl and the Pussycat, The Way We Were, and A Star Is Born, for which she received her second Academy Award, composing music for the love theme "Evergreen", the first woman to be honored as a composer.[10] With the release of Yentl in 1983, Streisand became the first woman to write, produce, direct, and star in a major studio film.[11] The film won an Oscar for Best Score and a Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture Musical; Streisand received the Golden Globe Award for Best Director, the first (and to date only) woman to win that award.

Streisand is one of the best-selling recording artists of all time, with more than 68.5 million albums in the U.S. and with a total of 150 million albums and singles sold worldwide[12][13] making her the best-selling female artist among top-selling artists recognized by the Recording Industry Association of America.[13][14] The RIAA and Billboard recognize Streisand as holding the record for the most top 10 albums of any female recording artist: a total of 34 since 1963. According to Billboard, Streisand holds the record for the female with the most number one albums (11).[15] Billboard also recognizes Streisand as the greatest female of all time on its Billboard 200 chart and one of the greatest artists of all time on its Hot 100 chart.[16][17] Streisand is the only recording artist to have a number-one album in each of the last six decades, having released 53 gold albums, 31 platinum albums, and 14 multi-platinum albums in the United States.[2]

Contents 1 Early life 1.1 Family 1.2 Education 2 Career beginnings 2.1 Nightclub shows and Broadway stage 2.2 Television appearances, marriage, and first albums 3 Career 3.1 Singing 3.2 Acting 4 Artistry 5 Personal life 5.1 Relationships and family 5.2 Name 5.3 Politics 5.4 Philanthropy 6 Legacy 6.1 Honors 6.2 Professional memberships 7 "Streisand effect" 8 Awards and nominations 8.1 Music awards 8.2 Film awards 9 Appearances 9.1 Broadway performances 9.2 West End performances 9.3 Television specials 10 Tours and live performances 11 Discography 12 Autobiography 13 Filmography 14 Notes 15 References 16 Further reading 17 External links Early life Family

Barbara Joan Streisand was born on April 24, 1942, in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of Diana (born Ida Rosen) and Emanuel Streisand. Her mother had been a soprano singer in her youth and considered a career in music, but later became a school secretary.[18] Her father was a high school teacher at the same school, where they first met.[19] Streisand's family was Jewish;[20][21][22] her paternal grandparents emigrated from Galicia (Poland–Ukraine) and her maternal grandparents from the Russian Empire, where her grandfather had been a cantor.[23][24]

Her father earned a master's degree from City College of New York in 1928 and was considered athletic and handsome. As a student, he spent his summers outdoors, once working as a lifeguard and another hitchhiking through Canada. "He'd try anything," his sister Molly said. "He wasn't afraid of anything." He married Ida in 1930, two years after graduating, and became a highly respected educator with a focus on helping underprivileged and delinquent youth.[25]:3

In August 1943, a few months after Streisand's first birthday, her father died suddenly at age 34 from complications from an epileptic seizure, possibly the result of a head injury years earlier.[25]:3 The family fell into near-poverty, with her mother working as a low-paid bookkeeper.[26] As an adult, Streisand remembered those early years as always feeling like an "outcast," explaining, "Everybody else's father came home from work at the end of the day. Mine didn't."[25]:3 Her mother tried to pay their bills but could not give her daughter the attention she craved: "When I wanted love from my mother, she gave me food," Streisand says.[25]:3

Streisand recalls that her mother had a "great voice" and sang semi-professionally on occasion, in her operatic soprano voice. During a visit to the Catskills when Streisand was thirteen, she told Rosie O'Donnell, she and her mother recorded some songs on tape. That session was the first time Streisand ever asserted herself as an artist, which also became her "first moment of inspiration" as an artist.[27]

She has an older brother, Sheldon, and a half-sister, the singer Roslyn Kind,[28][29][30] from her mother's remarriage to Louis Kind in 1949. Roslyn is nine years younger than Streisand.[31][32]

Education

Streisand began her education at the Jewish Orthodox Yeshiva of Brooklyn when she was five. There, she was considered to be bright and extremely inquisitive about everything; however, she lacked discipline, often shouting answers to questions out of turn.[33][25]:3 She next entered Public School 89 in Brooklyn, and during those early school years began watching television and going to movies. Watching the glamorous stars on the screen, she was soon entranced by acting and now hoped someday to become an actress, partly as a means of escape: "I always wanted to be somebody, to be famous . . .You know, get out of Brooklyn."[25]:3

Streisand became known by others in the neighborhood for her voice. With the other kids she remembers sitting on the stoop in front of their apartment building and singing: "I was considered the girl on the block with the good voice."[25]:3 That talent became a way for her to gain attention. She would often practice her singing in the hallway of her apartment building which gave her voice an echoing quality.[34]

She made her singing debut at a PTA assembly, where she became a hit to everyone but her mother, who was mostly critical of her daughter. Young Streisand was invited to sing at weddings and summer camp, along with having an unsuccessful audition at MGM records when she was nine. By the time she was thirteen, her mother began supporting her talent, helping her make a four-song demo tape, including "Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart," and "You'll Never Know."[25]:4

Although she knew her voice was good and she liked the attention, becoming an actress was her main objective. That desire was made stronger when she saw her first Broadway play, The Diary of Anne Frank, when she was fourteen. The star in the play was Susan Strasberg, whose acting she wanted to emulate if ever given the chance.[25]:4 To help achieve that goal, Streisand began spending her spare time in the library, studying the biographies of various stage actresses such as Eleanora Duse and Sarah Bernhardt. In addition, she began reading novels and plays, including some by Shakespeare and Ibsen, and also on her own, studied the acting theories of Konstantin Stanislavski and Michael Chekhov.[25]:4

She attended Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn in 1955 where she became an honor student in modern history, English, and Spanish. She also joined the Freshman Chorus and Choral Club, where she sang with another choir member and classmate, Neil Diamond.[35] Diamond recalls, "We were two poor kids in Brooklyn. We hung out in the front of Erasmus High and smoked cigarettes." The school was near an art-movie house, and he recalls that she was always aware of the films they were showing, while he wasn't as interested.[36]

During the summer of 1957 she got her first stage experience as a walk-on at the Playhouse in Malden Bridge, New York. That small part was followed by a role as the kid sister in Picnic and one as a vamp in Desk Set.[25]:4 She returned to school in Brooklyn but never took dramatic arts classes, preferring instead to gain some real-world stage experience. To that end, in her second year, she took a night job at the Cherry Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village helping backstage. When she was a senior, she rehearsed for a small part in Driftwood, a play staged in a midtown attic space.[25]:5 Her co-star in Driftwood was Joan Rivers.

At age sixteen, she graduated from Erasmus Hall in January 1959, and despite her mother's pleas that she stay out of show business, she immediately set out trying to get roles on the New York City stage.[25]:5 After renting a small apartment on 48th street, in the heart of the theater district, she accepted any job she could involving the stage, and at every opportunity, she "made the rounds" of the casting offices.[25]:5

Career beginnings Barbra Streisand, c. 1962.

At sixteen, then living on her own, Streisand's youth and ambition worked in her favor, but she lacked a mature woman's physical features which were needed for serious female roles. She therefore took various menial jobs to have some income. At one period, she lacked a permanent address, and found herself sleeping at the home of friends or anywhere else she could set up the army cot she carried around to save on rent expense. When desperate, she would return to her mother's flat in Brooklyn for a home-cooked meal. However, her mother would be horrified by her daughter's "gypsy-like lifestyle," wrote biographer Karen Swenson, and again begged her to give up trying to get into show business;[25]:6 but Streisand took her mother's pleadings as even more reason to keep trying: "My desires were strengthened by wanting to prove to my mother that I could be a star."[25]:6

She took a job as an usher at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater for The Sound of Music, early in 1960. During the run of the play, she heard that the casting director was auditioning for more singers, and it marked the first time she sang in pursuit of a job.[25]:6 Although the director felt she was not right for the part, he encouraged her to begin including her talent as a singer on her résumé when looking for other work.[25]:6

That suggestion prodded Streisand to think seriously about a singing career, in addition to acting. She asked her boyfriend, Barry Dennen, to tape her singing, copies of which she could then give out to possible employers. Dennen had acted with her briefly in an off-Broadway play, but had no reason to think she had any talent as a singer, and she never mentioned it. Nevertheless, he agreed and found a guitarist to accompany her:

We spent the afternoon taping, and the moment I heard the first playback I went insane ... This nutty little kook had one of the most breathtaking voices I'd ever heard ... when she was finished and I turned off the machine, I needed a long moment before I dared look up at her.[25]:6

Dennen grew enthusiastic and he convinced her to enter a talent contest at the Lion, a gay nightclub in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. She performed two songs, after which there was a "stunned silence" from the audience, followed by "thunderous applause" when she was pronounced the winner.[25]:7 She was invited back and sang at the club for several weeks.[37] It was during this time that she dropped the second "a" from her first name,[37] switching from "Barbara" to "Barbra", due to her dislike of her original name.[38]

Nightclub shows and Broadway stage

Streisand was next asked to audition at the Bon Soir nightclub, after which she was signed up at $125 a week. It became her first professional engagement, in September 1960, where she was the opening act for comedian Phyllis Diller. She recalls it was the first time she had been in that kind of upscale environment: "I'd never been in a nightclub until I sang in one."[25]:7

Dennen now wanted to expose Streisand to his vast record collection of female singers, including Billie Holiday, Mabel Mercer, Ethel Waters, and Édith Piaf. His effort made a difference in her developing style as she gained new respect for the art of popular singing. She also realized she could still become an actress by first gaining recognition as a singer.[25]:7 According to biographer Christopher Nickens, hearing other great female singers benefited her style, as she began creating different emotional characters when performing, which gave her singing a greater range.

Feeling more self-confident, she improved her stage presence when speaking to the audience between songs. She discovered that her Brooklyn-bred style of humor was received quite favorably.[25]:8 During the next six months appearing at the club, some began comparing her singing voice to famous names such as Judy Garland, Lena Horne and Fanny Brice. Her conversational ability to charm an audience with spontaneous humor during performances became more sophisticated and professional.[25]:8 Theater critic Leonard Harris, in one of his reviews, could already envision her future success: "She's twenty; by the time she's thirty she will have rewritten the record books."[25]:9

Her name is Barbra Streisand. She is 20 years old, she has a three-octave promiscuity of range, she packs more personal dynamic power than anybody I can recall since Libby Holman or Helen Morgan. She can sing as loud as Ethel Merman and as persuasively as Lena or Ella, or as brassy as a Sophie Tucker ... and only Barbra Streisand can turn "Cry Me a River" into something comparable to Enrico Caruso having his first bash at Pagliacci. When Streisand cries you a river, you got a river, Sam ... and she will be around 50 years from now if good songs are still written to be sung by good singers.

-- syndicated columnist Robert Ruark,on her 1963 performances at the Blue Angel.[39][40]

Streisand never lost her desire to be a stage actress and accepted her first role on the New York stage in Another Evening with Harry Stoones, a satirical comedy play in which she acted and sang two solos. The show received terrible reviews and closed the next day. With the help of her new personal manager, Martin Erlichman, she had successful shows in Detroit and St. Louis. Erlichman then booked her at an even more upscale nightclub in Manhattan, Blue Angel, where she became a bigger hit during the period of 1961 to 1962. Streisand once told Jimmy Fallon, whom she sang a duet with,[41] on the Tonight Show, that Erlichman was a "fantastic manager" and still managed her career after 50 years.[42]

While appearing at Blue Angel, theater director and playwright Arthur Laurents asked her to audition for a new musical comedy he was directing, I Can Get It for You Wholesale. She got the part of secretary to the lead actor businessman, played by then unknown Elliott Gould.[25]:9 They fell in love during rehearsals and eventually moved into a small apartment together. The show opened on March 22, 1962, at the Shubert Theater, and received rave reviews. Her performance "stopped the show cold," wrote Nickens,[25]:9 and she became Broadway's most exciting and youngest new star.[25]:10 Groucho Marx, while hosting the Tonight Show, told her that twenty was an "extremely young age to be a success on Broadway."[43] Streisand received a Tony nomination and New York Drama Critic's prize for Best Supporting Actress.[44] The show was recorded and it was the first time the public could purchase an album of her singing.[25]:10

Television appearances, marriage, and first albums

Streisand's first television appearance was on The Tonight Show, then credited to its usual host Jack Paar. She was seen during an April 1961 episode on which Orson Bean substituted for Paar. She sang Harold Arlen's "A Sleepin' Bee".[45] During her appearance, Phyllis Diller, also a guest on the show, called her "one of the great singing talents in the world."[46]

Later in 1961, before she was cast in Another Evening With Harry Stoones, she became a semi-regular on PM East/PM West, a talk/variety series hosted by Mike Wallace and Joyce Davidson.[47]

In May 1962, Streisand appeared on The Garry Moore Show where she sang "Happy Days Are Here Again" for the first time. Her sad, slow version of the 1930s upbeat Democratic Party theme song became her signature song during this early phase of her career.[25]:10

Johnny Carson had her on the Tonight Show half a dozen times in 1962 and 1963, and she became a favorite of his television audience and himself personally. He described her as an "exciting new singer."[48] During one show, she joked with Groucho Marx who liked her style of humor.[25]:10

She did three or four songs, and she was beyond brilliant – so amazing.

--Elliott Gould, about their first play together in 1961[49]

In December 1962, she made the first of a number of appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show. She was later a cohost on the Mike Douglas Show, and also made an impact on a number of Bob Hope specials. Performing with her on the Ed Sullivan Show was Liberace who became an instant fan of the young singer. Liberace invited her to Las Vegas, Nevada, to perform as his opening act at the Riviera Hotel. Liberace is credited with introducing Barbra to Western American audiences.[50] The following September during her ongoing shows at Harrah's Hotel in Lake Tahoe, she and Elliott Gould took time off to get married in Carson City, Nevada. With her career and popularity rising so quickly, she saw her marriage to Gould as a "stabilizing influence."[25]:11

Her first album, The Barbra Streisand Album in early 1963, made the top 10 on the Billboard chart and won three Grammy Awards.[25]:11 The album made her the best-selling female vocalist in the country.[25]:11 That summer she also released The Second Barbra Streisand Album, which established her as the "most exciting new personality since Elvis Presley."[25]:11 She ended that breakthrough year of 1963 by performing one-night concerts in Indianapolis, San Jose, Chicago, Sacramento, and Los Angeles.[25]:11

Streisand returned to Broadway in 1964 with an acclaimed performance as entertainer Fanny Brice in Funny Girl at the Winter Garden Theatre. The show introduced two of her signature songs, "People" and "Don't Rain on My Parade." Because of the play's overnight success, she appeared on the cover of Time. In 1964 Streisand was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Musical but lost to Carol Channing in Hello, Dolly! Streisand received an honorary "Star of the Decade" Tony Award in 1970.[51]

In 1966, she repeated her success with Funny Girl in London's West End at the Prince of Wales Theatre. From 1965 to 1968 she appeared in her first four solo television specials.

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