Barbra Streisand only wanted to act; singing was her way in
A teenager from Brooklyn who dreamed of the stage, Barbra Streisand was told she was too unattractive to be a star and advised to fix her nose. She refused, sang instead, and eventually collected an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony, and made history as the first woman to handle writing, producing, directing and the lead role on one big studio picture.
Streisand was born in Brooklyn on April 24, 1942. Her father, a high school teacher, died when she was barely over a year old, and the family slid close to poverty. She later said she felt like an outcast because other children's fathers came home at night. Around the neighbourhood she was the girl with the good voice, practising in the echoing hallway of her apartment block. At Erasmus Hall High School she sang in the choir alongside Neil Diamond and nursed a crush on the chess prodigy Bobby Fischer.
Acting was the real goal, sharpened when she saw The Diary of Anne Frank on Broadway at 14. She graduated at 16 in January 1959, moved into a tiny room on 48th Street against her mother's pleas, and carried an army cot from friend to friend when she had no fixed address. While ushering at The Sound of Music, she was told to put singing on her résumé. Her boyfriend Barry Dennen taped her and was stunned; he pushed her into a Greenwich Village talent night at the Lion, a gay club, and she took the prize. Around then she dropped a letter to become Barbra.
A $125-a-week slot at the Bon Soir, opening for Phyllis Diller, was her first professional job, and Dennen's records of singers like Billie Holiday and Édith Piaf helped her see that singing could lead to acting. Signing with Columbia, she traded higher pay for full artistic control. Her first album won the Grammy for Album of the Year.
Film followed. Funny Girl brought the Oscar for Best Actress, and writing the love theme for A Star Is Born made her the first woman honoured as a composer at the Oscars. Yentl in 1983 made film history, and her record sales exceed 150 million.
Source: Barbra Streisand
