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Barbra Streisand has been recognized with two Academy Awards, ten Grammy Awards including the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and the Grammy Legend Award, five Emmy Awards including one Daytime Emmy, a Special Tony Award, an American Film Institute award, a Kennedy Center Honors prize, four Peabody Awards, and eleven Golden Globes.
1. Barbra Joan Streisand is an American singer, songwriter, actress, and filmmaker.
2. During a career spanning six decades, she has become an icon in multiple fields of entertainment, winning numerous awards, which has earned her recognition as Mother of All Contemporary Pop Divas or Queen of The Divas.
3. Barbra Streisand has been recognized with two Academy Awards, ten Grammy Awards including the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and the Grammy Legend Award, five Emmy Awards including one Daytime Emmy, a Special Tony Award, an American Film Institute award, a Kennedy Center Honors prize, four Peabody Awards, and eleven Golden Globes.
4. Barbra Streisand is among a select group of entertainers who have been honored with all the major industry prizes.
5. Barbra Streisand is one of the best-selling music artists of all time, with more than 72.5 million albums in the United States and with a total of 245 million records sold worldwide, making her the best-selling female artist among the top-selling artists recognized by the Recording Industry Association of America.
6. After beginning a successful recording career in the 1960s, Streisand ventured into film by the end of the decade.
7. Barbra Streisand starred in the critically acclaimed Funny Girl, for which she won the Academy Award and Golden Globe Award for Best Actress.
8. Her other films include The Owl and the Pussycat, The Way We Were, and A Star Is Born, for which she received her second Academy Award, composing music for the love theme "Evergreen", the first woman to be honored as a composer.
9. With the release of Yentl in 1983, Streisand became the first woman to write, produce, direct, and star in a major studio film. The film won an Oscar for Best Score and Best Motion Picture Musical; Streisand received the Golden Globe Award for Best Director, the first (and to date only) woman to win that award.
10. The RIAA and Billboard recognize Streisand as holding the record for the most top-ten albums of any female recording artist: a total of 33 since 1963.
11. Barbra Streisand is the only recording artist to have a number-one album in each of the last six decades, having released 53 Gold albums, 31 Platinum albums, and 14 Multi-Platinum albums in the United States.
12. Barbra Streisand was born Barbara Joan Streisand on April 24, 1942, in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of Diana (born Ida Rosen) and Emanuel Streisand.
13. Her mother had been a soprano singer in her youth and considered a career in music, but later became a school secretary.
14. Her father was a high school teacher at the same school, where they first met.
15. Streisand's family was Jewish; her paternal grandparents immigrated from Galicia (Poland-Ukraine) and her maternal grandparents from Russia, where her grandfather had been a cantor.
16. Her father earned a master's degree from City College of New York in 1928 and was considered athletic and handsome. As a student, he spent his summers outdoors, once working as a lifeguard and another hitchhiking through Canada. "He'd try anything," his sister Molly said. "He wasn't afraid of anything." He married Ida in 1930, two years after graduating, and became a highly respected educator with a focus on helping underprivileged and delinquent youth.
17. In August 1943, a few months after Streisand's first birthday, her father died suddenly at age 34 from complications from an epileptic seizure, possibly the result of a head injury years earlier.
18. The family fell into near-poverty, with her mother working as a low-paid bookkeeper.
19. As an adult, Streisand remembered those early years as always feeling like an "outcast," explaining, "Everybody else's father came home from work at the end of the day. Mine didn't."
20. Barbra Streisand has an older brother, Sheldon, and a half-sister, the singer Roslyn Kind, from her mother's re-marriage to Louis Kind in 1949.
21. Barbra Streisand began her education at the Jewish Orthodox Yeshiva of Brooklyn when she was five.
22. Barbra Streisand next entered Public School 89 in Brooklyn, and during those early school years she began watching television and going to movies.
23. Watching the glamorous stars on the screen, she was soon entranced by acting and now hoped some day becoming an actress, partly as a means of escape: "I always wanted to be somebody, to be famous . . .You know, get out of Brooklyn."
24. Barbra Streisand became known by others in the neighborhood for having a good voice.
25. With the other kids she remembers sitting on the stoop in front of their flat and singing: "I was considered the girl on the block with the good voice."
26. She made her singing debut at a PTA assembly, where she became a hit to everyone but her mother, who was mostly critical of her daughter.
27. Barbra Streisand
28. Young Streisand was invited to sing at weddings and summer camp, along with having an unsuccessful audition at MGM records when she was nine.
29. By the time she was thirteen, her mother began supporting her talent, helping her make a four-song demo tape, including "Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart," and "You'll Never Know."
30. Although she knew her voice was good and she liked the attention, becoming an actress was her main objective.
31. To help achieve that goal, Streisand began spending her spare time in the library, studying the biographies of various stage actresses such as Eleanora Duse and Sarah Bernhardt.
32. In addition, she began reading novels and plays, including some by Shakespeare and Ibsen, and also on her own, studied the acting theories of Stanislavski and Chekhov.
33. Barbra Streisand attended Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn in 1955 where she became an honor student in modern history, English, and Spanish.
34. Barbra Streisand also joined the Freshman Chorus and Choral Club, where she sang with another choir member and classmate, Neil Diamond.
35. During the summer of 1957 she got her first stage experience as a walk-on at the Playhouse in Malden Bridge, New York.
36. At age sixteen, she graduated from Erasmus Hall in January 1959, and despite her mother's pleas that she stay out of show business, she immediately set out trying to get roles on the New York stage.
37. Barbra Streisand later was invited to audition at the Bon Soir nightclub, and was signed up at $125 a week. It became her first professional engagement, in September 1960, where she was the opening act for comedian Phyllis Diller.
38. Streisand's first television appearance was on The Tonight Show, then credited to its usual host Jack Paar. She was seen during an April 1961 episode on which Orson Bean substituted for Paar. She sang Harold Arlen's "A Sleepin' Bee".
39. Later in 1961, before she was cast in Another Evening With Harry Stoones, she became a semi-regular on PM East/PM West, a talk/variety series hosted by Mike Wallace and Joyce Davidson.
40. Barbra Streisand has recorded 50 studio albums, almost all with Columbia Records.
41. Her first film was a reprise of her Broadway hit, Funny Girl (1968), an artistic and commercial success directed by Hollywood veteran William Wyler. won the 1968 Academy Award for Best Actress for the role, sharing it with Katharine Hepburn (The Lion in Winter), the only time there has been a tie in this Oscar category.
42. Barbra Streisand is a mezzo-soprano who has a range consisting of well over two octaves from "low E to a high G and probably a bit more in either direction".
43. Barbra Streisand has been married twice. Her first husband was actor Elliott Gould, to whom she was married from 1963 until 1971. They had one child, Jason Gould, who appeared as her on-screen son in The Prince of Tides.
44. Her second husband is actor James Brolin, whom she married on July 1, 1998. While they have no children together, Brolin has two children from his first marriage, including actor Josh Brolin, and one child from his second marriage.
45. Both of her husbands, Gould and Brolin, starred in the 1970s conspiracy sci-fi thriller Capricorn One.
46. Barbra Streisand changed her name from Barbara to Barbra because, she said, "I hated the name, but I refused to change it."
47. In 1984, Streisand donated the Emanuel Streisand Building for Jewish Studies to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in the Mount Scopus campus, in memory of her father, an educator and scholar who died when she was young.
48. Barbra Streisand has personally raised $25 million for organizations through her live performances.
49. The Streisand Foundation, established in 1986, has contributed over $16 million through nearly 1,000 grants to "national organizations working on preservation of the environment, voter education, the protection of civil liberties and civil rights, women's issues and nuclear disarmament".
50. In 2009, Streisand gifted $5 million to endow the Barbra Streisand Women's Cardiovascular Research and Education Program at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center's Women's Heart Center.
Source: Wikipedia.org
