Barbra Streisand

Barbra Joan Streisand (born Barbara Joan Streisand, April 24, 1942) is an American singer-songwriter, actress, writer, film producer, and director. She has won two Academy Awards, eight Grammy Awards, five Emmy Awards including one Day time Emmy, a Special Tony Award, an American Film Institute award, a Kennedy Center Honors award, a Peabody Award, and is one of the few entertainers who have won an Oscar, Emmy, Grammy, and Tony Award. She is one of the most commercially and critically successful entertainers in modern entertainment history, with more than 71.5 million albums shipped in the United States and 145 million records sold worldwide. She is the best-selling female artist on the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) Top Selling Album Artists list, the only female recording artist in the top ten, and the only artist outside of the rock and roll genre. After beginning a successful recording career in the 1960s, by the end of the decade, Streisand ventured into film starring in the critically acclaimed Funny Girl (1968) and Hello, Dolly! (1969), the former for which she won the Academy Award and Golden Globe Award for Best Actress. Other notable films include The Owl and the Pussycat, The Way We Were and A Star Is Born for which she received her second Academy Award for composing the lyrics to the picture’s main song, Evergreen. By the 1980s, Streisand established herself as one of the film industry’s most notable figures by becoming the first woman to direct, produce, script and star in her own picture. According to the RIAA, Streisand holds the record for the most top-ten albums of any female recording artist - a total of 32 since 1963. Streisand has the widest span (48 years) between first and latest top-ten albums of any female recording artist. With her 2009 album, Love Is the Answer, she became one of the rare artists to achieve number-one albums in five consecutive decades. According to the RIAA, she has released 51 Gold albums, 30 Platinum albums, and 13 Multi-Platinum albums in the United States. --- Barbara Joan Streisand (see name change) was born on April 24, 1942, in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of Diana (née Ida Rosen) and Emanuel Streisand. Her mother was at one time a singer and her father was a high school teacher. Her family was Jewish; her paternal grandparents immigrated from Galicia (Poland) and her maternal grandparents from Russia. Fifteen months after Streisand's birth in August, 1943, her father died from complications from an epileptic seizure and the family fell into near-poverty. She has an older brother, Sheldon, and a half-sister, the singer Roslyn Kind, from her mother's re-marriage to Louis Kind in 1949. Roslyn Kind is nine years younger than Streisand. Streisand went to the Jewish Orthodox Yeshiva of Brooklyn, giving a solo performance at the age of seven. She later attended Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn and joined the Freshman Chorus and Choral Club. Streisand has recollected, "I'm so glad I came from Brooklyn – it's down to earth." Streisand became a nightclub singer while in her teens. She wanted to be an actress and appeared in summer stock and in a number of Off-Off-Broadway productions, including Driftwood (1959), with then-unknown Joan Rivers. Driftwood ran for only six weeks. Her boyfriend, Barry Dennen, helped her create a club act – first performed at The Lion, a popular gay nightclub in Manhattan's Greenwich Village in 1960 – and she achieved success as a singer. While singing at The Lion for several weeks, she changed her name from Barbara to Barbra. Afterward she appeared at other New York nightclubs, including the Bon Soir and the Blue Angel. One early appearance outside of New York City was at Enrico Banducci’s hungry i nightclub in San Francisco in 1963. In 1961, Streisand appeared at the Town and Country nightclub in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, but her appearance was cut short; the club owner did not appreciate her singing style. Streisand appeared at Baker's Keyboard Lounge in Detroit in 1961. Streisand's first television appearance was on The Tonight Show, then hosted by Jack Paar, in 1961, singing Harold Arlen's "A Sleepin' Bee". Orson Bean, who substituted for Paar that night, had seen the singer perform at a gay bar and booked her for the telecast. Later in 1961, Streisand became a semi-regular on PM East/PM West, a talk/variety series. PM East was hosted by Mike Wallace and Joyce Davidson. PM West was hosted by Terrence O'Flaherty. Westinghouse Broadcasting, which aired the television show in a select few cities (Boston, New York, Baltimore, Washington DC, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Chicago and San Francisco), wiped all the videotapes soon after broadcasting them. Audio segments from some episodes, which were saved by Streisand's fans, are part of the compilation CD Just for the Record, which went platinum in 1991. The singer said on 60 Minutes in 1991 that 30 years earlier Mike Wallace had been "mean, very mean" to her on PM East/PM West. He countered that she had been "totally self-absorbed." (Her response: "You invited me on your show to talk about subjects that interested me, and you dare to call me self-absorbed?") 60 Minutes included the audio of Streisand saying to him in 1961, "I like the fact that you are provoking. But don't provoke me." In 1962, after several appearances on PM East/PM West, Streisand first appeared on Broadway in the small but star-making role of Miss Marmelstein in the musical I Can Get It for You Wholesale. Her first album, The Barbra Streisand Album, won two Grammy Awards in 1963. Following her success in I Can Get It for You Wholesale, Streisand made several appearances on The Tonight Show in 1962 and 1963. Topics covered in her interviews with host  Johnny Carson included the empire-waisted dresses that she bought wholesale and her "crazy" reputation at Erasmus Hall High School. As is the case with Mike Wallace, only audio survives from small portions of her telecast conversations with Carson. It was at about this time that Streisand entered into a long and successful professional relationship with Lee Soltersand Sheldon Roskin as her publicists with the firm Solters/Roskin (later Solters/Roskin/Friedman). 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 1966, she repeated her success with Funny Girl in London's West End at the Prince of Wales Theatre. From 1965 to 1967 she appeared in her first four solo television specials.