Hello, Gorgeous! PEOPLE Celebrates Barbra Streisand in a New Special Edition
Barbra Streisand
First there is the singing voice. Soaring, crystalline, sometimes adorably nasal, always instantly recognizable. There is also the star power, evident from her first moments on a movie screen in Funny Girl, the fictional biopic of comedian Fanny Brice that today doubles as a documentary about the emergence of the icon in the lead role.
Barbra Streisand made her industry debut 60 years ago, with a small part in the Broadway cast of I Can Get It for You Wholesale. On opening night, March 22, 1962, she was just shy of 20 years old. If the math checks out, that puts her at 80 this year, a milestone PEOPLE is celebrating with a new special edition, Barbra Streisand: Her Life & Unrivaled Career.
An Oscar-Emmy-Grammy-winning actor-director-producer-composer-singer, Streisand long ago passed the point where her hyphens need hyphens. She is the sole recording artist to have a No. 1 album in six consecutive decades and surely the only person to have sung with both Judy Garland and Justin Bieber, with Louis Armstrong and Ariana Grande. Simply put, Barbra Streisand is not like anyone else.
MPTV; Getty Streisand with her "Hello Dolly" costar Louis Armstrong in 1969 and, below, with Ariana Grande for a 2019 duet.
Among other things, she is a film pioneer. After acting in Funny Girl, The Way We Were and other now-classics, she began wearing more Hollywood hats. For the 1976 remake of A Star Is Born Streisand was, in addition to being the lead actress, an executive producer and a wardrober, dressing her character from her own closet. Naturally she also did her own singing, and also co-wrote two songs on the soundtrack, including "Evergreen," for which she and Paul Williams took the Best Song Golden Globe and Oscar, making her the first woman to do so. "If she could have cooked, she would have been the caterer," teased Shirley MacLaine in an affectionate speech when Streisand won the Golden Globes' Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2000.
She went on to direct three films, Yentl, The Mirror Has Two Faces, and The Prince of Tides, which earned a Best Picture nomination in 1992. When the Academy neglected to nominate Streisand in the director category for Tides, Oscar night host Billy Crystal, in his opening number, sang what a lot of people were thinking: "Seven nominations on the shelf—did this film direct itself?")
This special edition of PEOPLE begins with Streisand's pre-fame roots, includes a look at her life off-stage: Streisand as a mom to singer Jason Gould, and more recently as a grandparent with husband James Brolin. Also: Streisand as an activist who has long raised her voice—most recently advocating for women's health equity—and as a style icon, whose look is as much a part of her celebrity as her sound.
As recently as 2020 The New York Times wrote that Streisand "wasn't conventionally pretty, at least not in the aristocratic, Grace Kelly mold." Well, honestly, who is in the Grace Kelly mold besides Grace Kelly? Here's where Streisand truly distinguished herself: She didn't care. Even as she became a style-setter, she didn't worry about critics. "I have been on the best-dressed list and at the same time the worst-dressed list," she told Life back in 1970. "I have been called crude, and I have been called elegant. I have been called ugly, and I have been called beautiful."
Kevin Mazur/WireImage Streisand with (from left), husband James Brolin, Josh Brolin, Trevor Brolin, and her son Jason Gould.
For all of her talents, for all of the accolades, that may be what makes Streisand uniquely appealing. When she opens her mouth to speak in that Brooklyn accent, she reveals that she is a lot like other people. She finds exercise tedious. She doesn't like getting up early. She would rather eat coffee ice cream than diet herself into sample sizes. She once contributed to a celebrity cookbook a dessert recipe of her own: It calls for milk, cream, instant coffee and 24 marshmallows—if this is not a girl after your own heart, you may be the sort of person who enthusiastically posts photos of broccoli on Instagram. Barbra, however, is one of us.
PEOPLE's special edition Barbra Streisand: Her Life & Unrivaled Career is available now wherever magazines are sold.
