Barbra Streisand, a voice that refused to become a monument

Barbra Streisand

Photo: NIH Image Gallery from Bethesda, Maryland, USA / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	April 24, 1942 Brooklyn, New York, United States
Occupation	Singer, Actress, Film Director
Known for	Meet the Fockers, Little Fockers, What's Up, Doc?
Awards	Academy Award (shared) · Academy Award · 2 Grammy · Grammy (lifetime achievement) · Emmy · Presidential Medal of Freedom · Kennedy Center Honors · Palme d’Or (honorary)

The question the music industry has never quite known how to answer is what to do with a woman who builds the room herself. Barbra Streisand did not ease into stardom by finding what worked for other people. She arrived demanding to choose her own material—a clause she insisted on putting into her very first recording contract with Columbia Records, at twenty years old—and then proceeded to demonstrate, over more than sixty years, that the demand was justified.

She grew up in Flatbush, Brooklyn, the daughter of a high school English teacher who died when she was fifteen months old, leaving her mother Diana to raise two children on a school secretary’s salary. Diana Streisand reportedly did not encourage her daughter’s ambitions; Barbra has described this withholding as one of the central forces of her career. She dropped an “a” from her name before she had any name to protect, graduated from Erasmus Hall High School at sixteen with honors in English and history, and moved immediately to Manhattan. She slept on friends’ couches. She sang for $125 a week at the Bon Soir nightclub in Greenwich Village. She won a talent contest at a small club on West Ninth Street. Within two years, she was on Broadway.

Her first significant Broadway role came in I Can Get It for You Wholesale in 1962—not as the lead, but as a supporting character named Miss Marmelstein, a role she turned into the thing people talked about when they left the theater. Columbia Records signed her the same year. Her debut, The Barbra Streisand Album, won three Grammy Awards including Album of the Year, becoming the fastest-selling debut album by a female vocalist in American chart history. That kind of superlative followed her not as decoration but as running tally.

Then came Funny Girl on Broadway in 1964, and the film adaptation in 1968—with it an Academy Award for Best Actress, tied with Katharine Hepburn in a split that had not happened before and has not happened since. She became the only performer in history to win competitive awards in all four major American entertainment categories: film, television, recording, and theater. The Way We Were (1974) produced a number-one single and an Oscar nomination for Best Actress. A Star Is Born (1976), which she co-produced, brought a second Oscar—for Best Original Song for Evergreen, making her the first woman to win that award as composer. Guilty (1980), produced with Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees, moved more than fifteen million copies worldwide. You Don’t Bring Me Flowers, a duet with Neil Diamond that became a number-one hit in 1978, demonstrated her ability to transform a passing collaboration into a signature moment.

The work that most clearly illuminates the contradictions in her career is not Guilty but the 1983 film Yentl, which she produced, directed, wrote, and starred in. The film received five Academy Award nominations. Streisand received none of them—not as director, not as producer, not as screenwriter. The Directors Guild of America nominated her. The Academy did not. She later described this as the most painful professional experience of her life, a judgment the industry’s own data did not support: Yentl was profitable and critically respected. The silence was not confusion about the film’s quality. Eight years later, she directed The Prince of Tides, which earned seven Oscar nominations including Best Picture—again without recognizing her direction. The pattern was clear. She kept directing anyway.

The Broadway Album (1985), recorded against the concerns of her label, reached number one and sold over seven million copies globally, validating a choice the industry had considered uncommercial. By the mid-1990s, she had achieved something that resists easy explanation: she was the only artist in recording history to reach number one on the Billboard 200 in six separate decades, a record that cannot be explained by either nostalgia or a single era’s tastes.

Her memoir My Name Is Barbra, published in November 2023 at more than a thousand pages and written without a co-author, spent months on bestseller lists. It covers the scope of a career that refuses to fit a single category—pop, Broadway, film, classical crossover, protest music—and reads as the document of someone who has consistently chosen not to let others tell the story. In June 2025, she released The Secret of Life: Partners, Volume Two, a collection of duets featuring Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, Ariana Grande, Hozier, and James Taylor, among others, which earned a Grammy nomination for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album. In September 2026, her producer Peter Asher confirmed that a new album is in development.

At eighty-four, Barbra Streisand has been declared a monument so many times that the designation has become a kind of noise. The records keep coming. A new one is almost ready.

Selected Discography

• The Barbra Streisand Album (1963)
• People (1964)
• A Christmas Album (1967)
• Barbra Joan Streisand (1971)
• The Way We Were (1974)
• Wet (1979)
• Guilty (1980)
• Emotion (1984)
• The Broadway Album (1985)
• Higher Ground (1997)
• Love Is the Answer (2009)
• The Secret of Life: Partners, Volume 2 (2025)

Tags: music-en1, singers, pop, Barbra Streisand, Barry Gibb, Guilty

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