It’s been four decades since The New York Times said of her that she was “the most influential mainstream American pop singer since Frank Sinatra.” Tickets for her few tours, despite costing in some cases more than €1,000, used to sell out in minutes.Īs for acting, her passion was born after seeing a performance of The Diary of Anne Frank in 1956. Her first album, released when she had not yet turned 21, became the bestselling record in US history performed by a woman – it spent more than 100 weeks on the sales charts – and achieved three Grammys.
One of the most powerful artists in the music and film industries, Streisand has sold more than 200 million records worldwide, a third of them in her own country.
Reviewing her achievements and her professional career, so diverse, complex and successful in so many fields, could easily sound like reading off a Wikipedia or IMDb listing. Like it or not, there is nobody quite like Barbra Streisand. Now, as she turns 80 and looks back at her life as a star (who no longer sells out tickets only because she no longer does tours) and a pioneer of music, cinema and theater, it seems that there is not much left of that little Jewish girl from Brooklyn.īut surely it all helped forge the legend that she has become. She got rejected on Broadway and earned a living singing in the bars of New York’s Greenwich Village in the late 1950s. Right after high school, she got an acting scholarship in exchange for babysitting the children of the owner of that school. The young girl realized early on that only her voice would help her make a living.
They were “loveless” places, as her older brother Sheldon once explained, where all they tried to do was avoid getting slapped and grounded. She was a fatherless child (her dad was a grammar teacher who died when she was 15 months old due to an epileptic seizure) who had to live first in the humble home of her grandparents and later in the one her mother created with her second husband. The one that her mother, Diana, didn’t hesitate to call ugly, shamelessly letting her know that she was the beast while her sister Rosalind was the beauty. It is likely that only Barbra Streisand herself knows for sure what remains of the child she once was.