Barbra Streisand
Barbara Joan "Barbra" Streisand is an American singer, actress, songwriter, producer, and director. Over a career spanning more than six decades, Streisand's success in the entertainment industry has included Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony awards.
Streisand began performing in the early 1960s in nightclubs and Broadway theaters, which led to guest appearances on various television shows. Signing onto Columbia Records, Streisand retained full artistic control of her performances in exchange for accepting lower pay—an arrangement that continued throughout her career. Her studio debut The Barbra Streisand Album won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year. During her recording career, Streisand has amassed a total of 31 RIAA platinum-certified albums, including People, The Way We Were, Guilty, The Broadway Album, and Higher Ground. She was the first woman to score 11 number one albums on the US Billboard 200—from People to Encore: Movie Partners Sing Broadway —and remains the only artist to top the chart in six decades. Streisand also topped the US Billboard Hot 100 with five singles: "The Way We Were", "Evergreen", "You Don't Bring Me Flowers", "No More Tears ", and "Woman in Love".
In the latter 1960s, after having established success as a vocalist, Streisand ventured into film. She starred in the critically acclaimed Funny Girl, winning the Academy Award for Best Actress. Additional fame on the big screen followed with the extravagant musical Hello, Dolly!, the screwball comedy What's Up, Doc?, and the romantic drama The Way We Were. Streisand won the Academy Award for Best Original Song for writing the love theme from A Star Is Born, the first woman to be honored as a composer. With the release of Yentl, Streisand became the first woman to write, produce, direct, and star in a major studio film. The film won an Oscar for Best Original Score and a Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture Musical. Streisand also received the Golden Globe Award for Best Director, becoming the first woman to win that award. Streisand then produced and directed The Prince of Tides, and The Mirror Has Two Faces.
With sales exceeding 150 million records worldwide, Streisand is one of the best-selling recording artists of all time. According to the Recording Industry Association of America, she is the second-highest certified female artist in the United States, with 68.5 million certified album units. Billboard ranked Streisand as the greatest solo artist on the Billboard 200 chart, as well as the top Adult Contemporary female artist of all time. Her accolades span ten Grammy Awards, including the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and the Grammy Legend Award; nine Golden Globe Awards; five Emmy Awards; four Peabody Awards; two Academy Awards; the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award; and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Early life
Family
Streisand was born April 24, 1942, in Brooklyn, New York City, to Diana Ida and Emanuel Streisand. Her mother had been a soprano in her youth and considered a career in music, but later became a school secretary. Her father was a high school teacher at the same school, where they first met. Streisand's family is Jewish. Her paternal grandparents emigrated from Galicia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and her maternal grandparents from the Russian Empire, where her grandfather had been a cantor.In August 1943, a few months after Streisand's first birthday, her father died at age 34 from complications from an epileptic seizure, possibly the result of a head injury years earlier. The family fell into near poverty, with her mother working as a low-paid bookkeeper. 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." 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.
Streisand recalled that her mother had a "great voice" and sang semi-professionally on occasion. In a 2016 interview with Rosie O'Donnell, Streisand recounted that when she was 13, she and her mother recorded some songs on tape during a visit to the Catskills. That session was the first time Streisand ever asserted herself as an artist, which also became her "first moment of inspiration."
She has an older brother, Sheldon, and a younger half-sister, singer Roslyn Kind, from her mother's remarriage to Louis Kind in 1950.
Education
Streisand began her education at the Jewish Orthodox Yeshiva of Brooklyn when she was five. She was considered bright and inquisitive; however, she lacked discipline, often shouting answers to questions out of turn. She next attended Public School 89 in Brooklyn, and during those early school years began watching television and going to movies. "I always wanted to be somebody, to be famous... You know, get out of Brooklyn."Streisand became known by others in the neighborhood for her voice. She remembers sitting on the stoop in front of their apartment building with the other kids and singing: "I was considered the girl on the block with the good voice." 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.
She made her singing debut at a parent–teacher association assembly, where she became a hit to everyone but her mother, who was mostly critical of her daughter. 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 13, 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".
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 14. The star in the play was Susan Strasberg, whose acting she wanted to emulate. 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 and studying the acting theories of Konstantin Stanislavski and Michael Chekhov.
In 1956, she attended Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, 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. 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. She had a crush on 15-year-old US Chess Champion and fellow student Bobby Fischer, whom she found to be "very sexy".
During the summer of 1957, she landed 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 as a vamp in Desk Set. 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.
She graduated from Erasmus Hall in January 1959 at age 16, and despite her mother's pleas that she stay out of show business, she set out trying to get roles on the New York City stage. 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.
Career
Beginnings
Living on her own at 16, Streisand took various menial jobs to have some income. During 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. When desperate, she returned to her mother's flat in Brooklyn for a home-cooked meal. However, her mother was 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, 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."Streisand 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. 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.
Streisand asked her boyfriend, Barry Dennen, to tape her singing, copies of which she could then give out to possible employers. Dennen found a guitarist to accompany her:.
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. She was invited back and sang at the club for several weeks. During this time, disliking her name, she changed it from "Barbara" to "Barbra".
In early days of her career, Streisand was repeatedly told she was too ugly to be a star and was advised to get a nose job, which she declined to do.
Nightclub shows
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."Dennen now wanted to expose Streisand to his vast record collection of female singers, including Billie Holiday, Mabel Mercer, Ethel Waters, and Édith Piaf. Streisand realized she could still become an actress by first gaining recognition as a singer. From his collection she drew the song that best defined her mission in singing: A Sleepin' Bee, with music by Harold Arlen and lyrics by Truman Capote for the 1954 musical House of Flowers. "The lyrics to that song gave me the three acts of a play that I longed for as an actress," Streisand said. "And Harold was one of those writers who could write these magnificent melodies. That gave me what I needed." 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.
Streisand improved her stage presence when speaking to the audience between songs. She discovered that her Brooklyn-bred style of humor was received favorably. 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. Theater critic Leonard Harris wrote: "She's twenty; by the time she's thirty she will have rewritten the record books."