"Barbra" Streisand

born April 24, 1942) is an American singer, 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, ten Grammy Awards including the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and the Grammy Legend Award, five Emmy Awards including one Daytime Emmy, a Special Tony Award, an American Film Institute award, a Kennedy Center Honors prize, four Peabody Awards, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and nine Golden Globes. 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.

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. With the release of Yentl in 1983, Streisand became the first woman to write, produce, direct, and star in a major studio film. 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 making her the best-selling female artist among top-selling artists recognized by the Recording Industry Association of America. 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). 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. 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

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

Early life

Family

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. Her father was a high school teacher at the same school, where they first met. Streisand's family was Jewish; her paternal grandparents emigrated from Galicia (Poland–Ukraine) and her maternal grandparents from the Russian Empire, where her grandfather had been a cantor.

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.: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.:3 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.":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.: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 13, 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.

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