Barbara Streisand

Barbara Streisand biography

Barbra Joan Streisand (pronounced ; born April 24, 1942) is an American singer, actress, writer, film producer and director. She has won two Academy Awards, eight Grammy Awards, five Emmy Awards including one Daytime Emmy, a Special Tony Award, an American Film Institute award, a Peabody Award, and is one of the few entertainers who have won an Oscar, Emmy, Grammy, and Tony Award.

She is one of the most commercially and critically successful entertainers in modern entertainment history, with more than 71.5 million albums shipped in the United States and 140 million albums sold worldwide. She is the best-selling female artist on the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) Top Selling Artists list, the only female recording artist in the top ten, and the only artist outside of the rock and roll genre. Along with Frank Sinatra, Cher, and Shirley Jones, she shares the distinction of being awarded an acting Oscar and also recording a number-one single on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart.

According to the RIAA, Streisand holds the record for the most top-ten albums of any female recording artist - a total of 32 since 1963. Streisand has the widest span (48 years) between first and latest top-ten albums of any female recording artist. With her 2009 album, Love Is the Answer, she became one of the rare artists to achieve number-one albums in five consecutive decades. According to the RIAA, she has released 51 Gold albums, 30 Platinum albums, and 13 Multi-Platinum albums in the United States.

Early life

Barbara Joan Streisand (see name change) was born on April 24, 1942, in Brooklyn, New York, to a Jewish family, the daughter of Emanuel and Diana (née Rosen) Streisand, both of Austrian descent. She is the second of two siblings sired by Emanuel (her older brother is Sheldon), who was a respected high school teacher. Fifteen months after Streisand's birth, her father died of a cerebral hemorrhage and the family went into near-poverty. Streisand first attended the Jewish Orthodox Yeshiva of Brooklyn, giving a solo performance at the age of 7. She later attended Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn and joined the Freshman Chorus and Choral Club.. Streisand recollects, "I'm so glad I came from Brooklyn--it's down to earth."

Diana Rosen Streisand remarried Louis Kind in 1949 Kind is 9 years younger than Barbra.

Barbra Streisand became a nightclub singer while in her teens. She wanted to be an actress and appeared in summer stock and in a number of Off-Off-Broadway productions, including Driftwood (1959), with then-unknown Joan Rivers. (In her autobiography, Rivers wrote that she played a lesbian with a crush on Streisand's character, but this was later denied by the play's author.) Driftwood ran for only six weeks. When her boyfriend, Barry Dennen, helped her create a club act - first performed at The Lion, a popular gay nightclub in Manhattan's Greenwich Village in 1960 - she achieved success as a singer. While singing at The Lion for several weeks, she changed her name from Barbara to Barbra. Afterward she appeared at other New York nightclubs, including the Bon Soir and the Blue Angel. One early appearance outside of New York City was at Enrico Banducci's hungry i nightclub in San Francisco. In 1961, Streisand appeared at the Town and Country nightclub in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, but her appearance was cut short; the club owner did not appreciate her singing style. Streisand appeared at Baker's Keyboard Lounge in Detroit in 1961.

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