Barbra Streisand attained stardom through her richly resonant vocal technique, magnetic presence, and fiercely self-reliant outlook, establishing herself among the most artistically and financially triumphant entertainers of her generation. Her ascent as a vocalist stood out because it occurred despite the prevailing dominance of rock & roll, a style she never embraced, and because she leveraged those vocal abilities to launch parallel careers as a stage and screen performer as well as a motion-picture director. Recognition arrived immediately: a Tony nomination and the New York Drama Critic’s prize for Best Supporting Actress accompanied her 1962 Broadway debut in the musical comedy I Can Get It for You Wholesale. Subsequent honors included multiple Grammy and Academy Awards, among them two Grammys for the 1963 debut album The Barbra Streisand Album, a Best Actress Oscar for her screen debut in 1968’s Funny Girl, and both a Grammy and an Oscar for her contributions to 1976’s A Star Is Born. Her cinematic output proved equally influential, encompassing the already-mentioned Funny Girl, 1972’s What’s Up, Doc?, and 1973’s The Way We Were opposite Robert Redford. She also became the first woman awarded Best Director at the Golden Globes for 1984’s Yentl, a project in which she starred and for which she supplied the soundtrack. Singing nevertheless remained her primary domain, yielding eleven number-one albums—the highest total for any female artist—including 1964’s People, 1980’s Guilty with Barry Gibb, 1997’s Higher Ground, and 2014’s Partners. She reentered the Top 20 with 2018’s Walls and presented seldom-heard and previously unreleased recordings spanning her career on the Release Me and Release Me 2 collections. Additional distinctions comprise five Emmy Awards, a Kennedy Center Honors prize, four Peabody Awards, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and nine Golden Globes. Beyond the stage and screen, Streisand has maintained a vocal commitment to civil-rights and environmental causes while establishing the Streisand Foundation.
Born in 1942 and raised in Brooklyn, New York, she endured a brief period of struggle as an actress and nightclub singer in New York during the early ’60s before securing her initial Broadway role in I Can Get It for You Wholesale in 1962. The cast album from that production, together with a later appearance on a studio revival of Pins and Needles, constituted her earliest recordings. After signing with Columbia Records, she issued her first album, The Barbra Streisand Album, in 1963; it reached the Top Ten and achieved gold status, thereby solidifying her position among the decade’s leading record sellers.
Despite three commercially viable albums by early 1964, Streisand declined potentially lucrative concert engagements to accept the lead in the Broadway production Funny Girl, where she performed for more than two years. The song “People” from the show became her first Top Ten single, while the accompanying People album marked her initial chart-topping LP. She entered television in 1965 with My Name Is Barbra, the first of five network specials. In 1967 she traveled to Hollywood to film Funny Girl, earning an Academy Award for the performance. By 1970, however, after her second and third films underperformed and her recordings faced competition from rock music, she appeared headed for a Las Vegas residency before turning thirty. Instead, she revived her hit-making momentum with a Top Ten cover of Laura Nyro’s “Stoney End” and a non-singing role in the comedy The Owl and the Pussycat.
Throughout the ’70s Streisand merged her musical and acting pursuits, first with The Way We Were, a successful film whose theme became her first number-one single, and subsequently with A Star Is Born, which included her second number-one single, “Evergreen,” a composition she co-wrote. Thereafter every album she released sold at least a million copies. Late in the decade she scored further successes through partnerships: the duet with Neil Diamond, “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers,” reached number one, as did the dance track “No More Tears (Enough Is Enough)” with Donna Summer. Her biggest-selling album arrived in 1980 with Guilty, written and produced by Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees and featuring the number-one hit “Woman in Love.” In 1983 her directorial debut Yentl succeeded both as film and as a Top Ten soundtrack album. The Broadway Album restored her to the summit of the charts in 1985. The 1991 box-set retrospective Just for the Record… appeared alongside her second directorial effort, The Prince of Tides. She resumed concert performances in 1994, resulting in the Top Ten, million-selling album The Concert. In 1996 she directed her third film, The Mirror Has Two Faces, and in 1999 she released A Love Like Ours.
Timeless: Live in Concert, captured during her Las Vegas engagement on New Year’s Eve 1999, appeared on both CD and DVD in 2000. The holiday album Christmas Memories followed a year later, succeeded in 2003 by the sequel to The Broadway Album titled The Movie Album. A deluxe CD/DVD edition of the original Guilty emerged in 2005 and was quickly followed by Guilty Pleasures, a new project that reunited Streisand with Gibb. She returned to the concert stage in 2006, an undertaking documented on the 2007 Sony release Live in Concert. For her final album of the decade she focused on jazz standards; Love Is the Answer showcased interpretations of “Here’s to Life” and “In the Wee Small Hours.” Released in 2011, What Matters Most: Barbra Streisand Sings the Lyrics of Alan and Marilyn Bergman presented ten previously unrecorded Bergman songs, among them “The Windmills of Your Mind” and “So Many Stars.”
In 2012 a collection of unreleased material surfaced, drawn from hundreds of hours of ’60s acetates and 48-track tapes assembled by Streisand and co-producer Jay Landers. Titled Release Me, the set spans recordings from 1967 to 2011 that illustrate the breadth of her career. She toured extensively in support of the project; a highlight was her inaugural performance in her hometown at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, featuring guest appearances by trumpeter Chris Botti and the poperatic trio Il Volo. That concert was recorded and issued in 2013 as the double live album Back to Brooklyn.
In 2014 Streisand returned with the Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds-produced duets album Partners, which paired her with Michael Bublé, Andrea Bocelli, Lionel Richie, and John Mayer among others. Two years later she followed with Encore: Movie Partners Sing Broadway, featuring duets on classic Broadway material alongside Alec Baldwin, Anne Hathaway, Hugh Jackman, and additional artists. Both projects reached the top of the Billboard 200. She mounted a concert tour supporting Encore: Movie Partners Sing Broadway, performing sixteen shows across fourteen cities between August 2016 and May 2017. Her December 5, 2016 performance in Miami was preserved in both audio and video formats; the resulting album The Music… The Mem’ries… The Magic! appeared in December 2017, while the accompanying concert film premiered on Netflix on November 22, 2017. The following year she released the Grammy-nominated Walls, a politically and socially engaged album reflecting her concerns about contemporary global conditions and American democracy; it reached number six in the U.K. and number twelve on the Billboard 200. Her second volume of rare and previously unreleased material, Release Me 2, was issued in August 2021.
