Barbra Streisand was born on 24 April 1942 in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in a world that did not obviously promise her stardom. Her father died when she was an infant, her family lived modestly, and the young girl who dreamed of the stage did not look or sound like the conventional starlets of her day. Yet by her early twenties she had become one of the most unmistakable voices in American popular music, and by the end of the 1960s she was also a film star, an Academy Award winner, and a cultural force who seemed to rewrite the rules simply by being herself. For Past Tunes readers who love the songs and films of the 1970s and 1980s, Streisand is essential listening and essential viewing, because her career bridges Broadway, the recording studio, and Hollywood with unusual completeness.
Her breakthrough came not through a lucky screen test but through relentless work in New York clubs and on Broadway. After a period singing in Greenwich Village nightclubs, she won attention for her startling vocal control, her comic timing, and her ability to make a familiar song sound newly personal. Her Broadway debut in I Can Get It for You Wholesale in 1962 brought a Tony nomination, and her starring role in Funny Girl in 1964 made her a Broadway legend before she was twenty-two. Audiences did not merely admire her voice; they recognised a personality — witty, vulnerable, stubborn, funny, and fiercely intelligent — that would define her screen work as well.
When Streisand repeated her stage triumph as Fanny Brice in the film Funny Girl in 1968, she won the Academy Award for Best Actress in her very first film role, sharing the honour with Katharine Hepburn. It was an extraordinary debut, and it set a pattern: Streisand rarely chose safe, decorative parts. She gravitated toward women who talked back, who wanted more than the world offered them, and who used humour as both armour and weapon. In Hello, Dolly! she played the great matchmaker Dolly Levi with full-throated confidence; in The Owl and the Pussycat she proved she could carry a sharp, unsentimental comedy without singing a note; and in What’s Up, Doc? she became the definitive screwball heroine of the new Hollywood, fast-talking, fearless, and gloriously disruptive.
The 1970s were Streisand’s golden decade on screen. The Way We Were in 1973, opposite Robert Redford, gave her one of her most beloved dramatic roles as Katie Morosky, a passionate political activist whose love affair with an easygoing writer could not survive their differences. The film’s title song became one of her signature recordings, and the story’s bittersweet ending has kept audiences debating it for fifty years. She returned to Fanny Brice in Funny Lady in 1975, then remade A Star Is Born in 1976 as a rock-era romance with Kris Kristofferson, winning an Oscar for the song “Evergreen” and confirming her power as both a screen star and a recording artist. Even a lighter comedy such as The Main Event in 1979, in which she played a bankrupt perfume magnate who becomes a boxing promoter, showed her gift for turning a far-fetched premise into pure star entertainment.
What sets Streisand apart from many singers who tried acting is the seriousness with which she approached both crafts. She was famously demanding on set, involved in casting, arrangements, camera angles, and editing choices long before it was fashionable for a star to claim that kind of control. Critics sometimes mistook that perfectionism for difficulty, but the results speak for themselves: her performances are unusually detailed, her musical numbers are shaped with a director’s eye, and her films often feel personal in a way that studio products rarely do. She did not simply lend her voice to a film; she shaped the film around what she believed the story needed.
That ambition reached its fullest expression in Yentl in 1983, the film she directed, co-wrote, co-produced, and starred in. Based on Isaac Bashevis Singer’s story about a young Jewish woman in early twentieth-century Eastern Europe who disguises herself as a man in order to study sacred texts, Yentl was a project Streisand pursued for more than a decade against considerable industry scepticism. Its success — including the Golden Globe for Best Director, making her the first woman to win that award — proved that a female star could command a major studio film from behind the camera as well as in front of it. She followed it with the courtroom drama Nuts in 1987, a fierce, largely unsung performance as a woman fighting to be declared competent to stand trial, and later directed the acclaimed dramas The Prince of Tides and The Mirror Has Two Faces.
Beyond the screen, Streisand’s recording career never paused. Across the 1970s and 1980s she released a string of best-selling albums, moved between Broadway standards, pop, disco-influenced hits, and deeply personal songwriting, and remained one of the best-selling recording artists of all time. Songs such as “The Way We Were,” “Evergreen,” “Woman in Love,” and “No More Tears (Enough Is Enough)” with Donna Summer became part of the era’s soundtrack, and her concerts became events in themselves. For listeners discovering her today, that catalogue is a reminder that her fame was never based on one hit or one film, but on decades of sustained artistry.
Streisand also matters because she changed what a female star could look like, sound like, and demand. She kept her Brooklyn accent, her distinctive profile, and her Jewish identity at the centre of her public image at a time when Hollywood routinely asked stars to soften those things. She sang songs her own way, slowed them down, phrased them like conversation, and trusted audiences to follow her. She fought for creative control, for the right to direct, and for stories about complicated women. Younger performers, from singers to directors, have cited her as proof that an artist need not choose between commercial success and personal vision.
This collection celebrates that legacy through ten signature roles, from the show-stopping debut of Funny Girl to the courtroom fire of Nuts. Each article looks at one film in detail: the character Streisand played, the director who guided her, the story that surrounded her, and why the performance still rewards a fresh viewing. Together they trace an arc from Broadway prodigy to screen icon to pioneering director — a journey driven, above all, by a voice and a will that refused to be ordinary.