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Barbra Streisand: The Voice That Redefined Stardom
Born 24 April 1942 in Brooklyn, Barbra Streisand became one of the only entertainers in history to conquer music, film, and Broadway — almost entirely on her own creative terms.
Chris
7/9/20262 min read
Born Barbara Joan Streisand on 24 April 1942 in Brooklyn, New York, she grew up in a working-class Jewish family; her father, a schoolteacher, died when she was 15 months old, and she has said the loss shaped her drive to prove herself. She began performing in small Greenwich Village nightclubs as a teenager barely out of high school, and her unmistakable voice — full-throated, technically precise, utterly distinctive — got her noticed almost immediately, leading to a recording contract with Columbia Records at just 20.
Her Broadway breakthrough came in 1964 with Funny Girl, playing comedienne Fanny Brice; she reprised the role in the 1968 film adaptation and won the Academy Award for Best Actress, tying with Katharine Hepburn in one of the closest votes in Oscar history. It was the start of a film career that included Hello, Dolly! (1969), The Way We Were (1973), and A Star Is Born (1976), for which she co-wrote the song "Evergreen" — making her the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Original Song as a composer.
She didn't stop at performing. In 1983 she directed, produced, co-wrote, and starred in Yentl, becoming the first woman to do all four on a major studio film — a feat she repeated with The Prince of Tides (1991), which earned seven Oscar nominations including Best Picture. Off-screen, her recording career has made her the best-selling female recording artist in U.S. history, with more than 50 studio albums spanning five decades of pop, standards, and Broadway.
Streisand's reach extends well beyond entertainment. Her long-running political activism and fundraising for Democratic causes made her one of Hollywood's most visible progressive voices, and in 2003 her attempt to suppress aerial photographs of her Malibu home backfired so spectacularly that it gave rise to a new term for the internet age: the "Streisand effect," describing how trying to hide information can draw far more attention to it.
Her honors span nearly every major award in American entertainment: competitive Grammy, Oscar, and Emmy wins, plus a Special Tony Award for lifetime achievement in theatre — a combination only a small handful of performers have achieved. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama in 2015 and the Kennedy Center Honors in 2008, recognition that reflects a career built on doing things her own way in an industry that rarely made room for women to do so.
She married actor Elliott Gould in 1963 — their son, Jason Gould, is also an actor and singer — and has been married to actor James Brolin since 1998. Streisand continues to record and occasionally perform, and remains one of the few entertainers of her generation to have built a body of work almost entirely on her own creative control.
Curious to go deeper into her story? Her own 2023 memoir, "My Name Is Barbra," is a nearly 1,000-page account of her life in her own words. William J. Mann's acclaimed biography, "Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand," is also well worth reading for an outside perspective on her early rise.