“Talent, but too ugly,” a casting henchman once noted on her application folder. Barbra Streisand always remembered that. She knew beforehand that she wanted to be a star. But from that moment on, she realized that the real challenge would be becoming a star on her terms. The humiliation became an almost manic motivation. Streisand became a star who does not conform to ideals and expectations. A star nonetheless.
She had grown up with rejection. Streisand was born in 1942 in the Williamsburg district of New York, Jewish, conservative, far removed from the glittering show lights of Broadway. The father, an elementary school teacher, died when she was 15 months old. For as long as she could remember, she would often tell she wanted to be a movie star. But even her mother told her that the best she could do was to be a secretary.
She had the talent to turn every song into a drama about life and death with her voice
However, Barbra, who was still called Barbara at the time and later dropped the middle “a” because she felt more like a Barbra, could sing very well. As a young woman, she performed in New York nightclubs and gay bars, where she became so successful that she soon received offers to appear on television. She had the talent to turn every song into a drama about life and death with her voice. You can see that impressively in their first TV appearances. When she sang “When The Sun Comes Out” on The Garry Moore Show in 1962, the images were stark, black-and-white post-war television. But her voice brought color to the performance – the sun actually seemed to rise.
First film and the award for best actress: Barbra Streisand 1969 at the Oscars.
(Photo: George Birch/dpa)
“I became a singer because I just couldn’t get any acting jobs,” she later said. It wasn’t until she pestered people on Broadway long enough to land a small supporting role in the musical I Can Get It for You Wholesale that she was able to show what she still could. And how. In just a few years, in her early twenties, she became a newcomer, heralded on stage by veteran stars like Dean Martin and Judy Garland.
She had a sense of self-mockery and slapstick alien to the Hollywood divas of the time
She stayed true to her promise not to bend over backwards. Streisand did not correspond to any type of woman, and certainly not to any star model of post-war American society. She wasn’t blonde. She proudly held her big nose up to the cameras. She had a sense of self-mockery and slapstick that was alien to the Hollywood divas of the time, frozen in their own mysticism. your will, as misfit Breaking into the mainstream made her a figurehead in the women’s and gay rights movement early in her career, and she was proud of it.
In 1968 she made her first feature film, Funny Girl, an adaptation of the musical she had previously acted on Broadway. During the shooting, she is said to have clearly told the director and multiple Oscar winner William Wyler, who made “Ben Hur” among other things, where to set up his spotlights. Wyler is said to have been moderately enthusiastic. Streisand got an Oscar.
With almost every film or album, she ripped down the rules and hierarchies of show business, not just as an artist but as a businesswoman. With the record “Stoney End”, with which she said goodbye to the cover versions of old classics in the post-Woodstock period and entered modern pop music, she learned how to stay true to your image and still vary it over and over again. She made a chameleon career, which later lay down Madonna and Beyoncé. In 1976 she re-filmed the classic “A Star Is Born” and turned the staid 1930s revue into a rock musical, for which she was one of the first women in Hollywood to be named “Executive Producer” in the credits, a revolution.
Barbra Streisand with director Peter Bogdanovich, with whom she made “Is What, Doc?” in 1972. turned.
(Photo: Imago)
And yes, even in the league of the biggest superstars you are not infallible. When she unsuccessfully sued a website for $50 million in damages in 2003 because her house was somewhere among the many thousands of aerial photos of the Californian coast that hardly anyone was interested in, she became the namesake of the “Streisand Effect”: First the lawsuit drew the internet’s attention to the location of her home, and since then it’s been called the phenomenon of trying to suppress information, which results in the opposite.
But defeats and contradictions are part of the repertoire for Barbra Streisand, who turns 80 on Sunday. She once described herself as: “I am simple, complex, generous, selfish, unattractive, beautiful, lazy and driven.”