Cheers for bossy boots
NEW YORK: “Ever since I can remember,” Barbra Streisand told a crowd at Lincoln Center on Monday night, “people have been calling me bossy and opinionated.”
She continued: “Maybe that’s because I am. Three cheers for bossy women!” The crowd roared. Of course, the crowd – which included the singer’s friends, Bill and Hillary Clinton, was roaring at pretty much anything connected to her all evening, as the legend of song and screen was honoured for her film career with the 40th annual Chaplin Award from the Film Society of Lincoln Center.
The Streisand fans especially loved the film highlights, which covered everything from Funny Girl and The Way We Were to The Owl and the Pussycat, What’s Up, Doc? and Meet the Fockers.
And then there was Yentl – the first Hollywood movie to be directed, produced, written and starred in by a woman, as the crowd was reminded.
Streisand spoke of how hard it was to get funding to make the film. Producers, it seemed, weren’t as passionate as she was about the tale of a Jewish girl in Eastern Europe who so longed to study the Talmud that she disguised herself as a boy. It was only when Streisand agreed to turn the movie into a musical – and most importantly, sing in it herself – that she was able to go ahead with the project.
“It’s funny how things always come back to music,” she said. “How it saves me.”
Streisand, who turns 71 this week, is one of the few entertainers to have won Oscar, Emmy, Grammy and Tony awards. Although she is perhaps most loved for her beautiful singing voice, she told the audience that as a young child, what she wanted most was to be an actress. But nobody really wanted “a 15-year-old Medea,” she noted. “Thank God I was given a good voice,” she said, explaining how her singing opened the doors to acting.
Not that acting was so easy in the early going. At age 16, she recalled, she had to show in a scene that she was in love with a man. But she was not attracted to the actor, she said, so she placed a piece of chocolate cake nearby – so she could stare at that longingly, instead. For the awards gala, Streisand was serenaded by Wynton Marsalis on trumpet, by Liza Minnelli, and by Tony Bennett, who closed the show with the song, Smile, fittingly a Charlie Chaplin song. – Sapa-AP