A STAR IS BORN
TURNS 80, MARION McMULLEN LOOKS BACK AT HER RISE TO FAME
IT was at 5.08 in the morning that Barbra Streisand made her entrance into the world in Brooklyn, New York, on April 24, 1942. Her mother Diana was a school secretary and her father Emanuel was a high school teacher, who sadly died when she was just 15 months old.
Her career in the early 1960s saw her sharing a $62 a month tiny apartment above a restaurant with actor Elliot Gould and the couple were later married for a time.
She once claimed: “I just became a singer because I could never get work as an actress” but Barbra’s talent was evident from the start. She appeared on Broadway in the 1962 musical comedy I Can Get It For You Wholesale and was nominated for an Emmy for a 1963 TV appearance on The Judy Garland Show.
She said of Judy: “Doing that with Judy was a wonderful experience. We fell in love with each other and we became good friends afterwards. She was just a wonderful, vulnerable creature with this glorious voice.”
Barbra’s stage success in Funny Girl led to her being cast in the 1968 film version. She would win an Oscar for her engaging performance as vaudeville entertainer Fanny Brice. It was an auspicious start and Barbra has become one of the most successful performers of her era across music, film and theatre.
“I arrived in Hollywood without having my nose fixed, my teeth capped or my name changed,” she once said. “That is very gratifying to me.” She also resisted getting plastic surgery on her nose in case it changed the sound of her distinctive voice.
The Oscar, Grammy, Emmy and Tony award-winning performer has starred in films like The Way We Were With Robert Redford, Hello, Dolly! directed by Gene Kelly and A Star Is Born with Kris Kristofferson. She has also played Ben Stiller’s outspoken sex therapist mum in 2010 comedy movie Little Fockers.
Yentl in 1983, The Prince Of Tides in 1991 and 1996 movie The Mirror Of Two Faces also showed her skill as a director as well as a performer.
“I hate tooting my own horn,” said Barbra, “but after Steven Spielberg saw Yentl, he said ‘I wish I could tell you how to fix your picture, but I can’t. It’s the best film I’ve ever seen since Citizen Kane.”
She presented John Wayne with his only Oscar at the 42nd Academy Awards and Prince Charles chose her song Don’t Rain On My Parade last year as one of his favourite tracks. He said he had seen her perform on set at Warner Bros Studios when he served as a young lieutenant on HMS Jupiter.
Withnail & I actor Richard E Grant has described himself as a Streisand super fan and said he wrote her a letter when he was 14 offering her a two-week holiday or longer at his family home in Swaziland, now known as Eswatini. He wrote there was “no chance of being mobbed” because no-one would know who she was in the African country.
He was moved to tears when she replied to his letter 47 years later saying “Dear Richard What a wonderful letter you wrote me when u were 14 ! and look at u now!”
Richard finally met his idol at the Oscars in 2019 and backstage later that same year at her British Summer Time show in Hyde Park. “
Barbra, who has been married to actor and director James Brolin for 24 years, has been a frequent visitor to British shores over the years since appearing in a four-month West End run of Funny Girl in 1966. She was pregnant with her son Jason at the time and threw a champagne party dedicated to the cast at the end of the run. Celebrity guests including Tony
Newley and Joan
Collins. She also met legendary actor, playwright and composer Noel Coward the same year at a performance at the American Embassy.
Barbra says visiting the UK has made her a fan of British food over the years and she loves tucking into Yorkshire pudding, shepherd’s pie and tea and scones.
She once told Zoe Ball on BBC Radio 2: “When I was making Yentl in England, four o’clock every day we stopped for tea and scones and pasties. I mean, if I love it, I have to share it with my cast and crew”.
Barbra has said she has always thought of herself as a girl from Brooklyn and says: “I am simple, complex, generous, selfish, unattractive, beautiful, lazy
and driven.”
AS BARBRA STREISAND