Barbra Streisand

Barbra Streisand is an American singer, actress, songwriter, and filmmaker whose six-decade career has produced one of the defining bodies of work in 20th-century American popular music and film — making her one of only 19 EGOT-class performers and the recipient of two Academy Awards, eleven Grammy Awards, five Emmy Awards, four Peabody Awards, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Kennedy Center Honors. She was born Barbara Joan Streisand on April 24, 1942, in Brooklyn, New York City, into a working-class Brooklyn-Jewish family. Her father Emanuel Streisand was an English-and-history schoolteacher who died of an epileptic seizure when Barbara was 15 months old, and her mother Diana Rosen was a school secretary.

Her breakthrough came across her 1960 Greenwich Village club-singing engagements at the Bon Soir cabaret on West 8th Street. Her 1962 Broadway debut at age 19 in the original Off-Broadway cast of I Can Get It for You Wholesale — for which she received the 1962 New York Drama Critics' Circle Award — launched her 1964 Broadway lead role as Fanny Brice in Funny Girl.

Her 1968 film debut as Fanny Brice in William Wyler's Funny Girl — the William Wyler film adaptation of her 1964 Broadway musical — won her the 1969 Best Actress Academy Award (which she shared with Katharine Hepburn for The Lion in Winter in the only Best Actress tie in Academy Award history). Her subsequent late-1960s and 1970s film career produced Hello, Dolly! (1969), The Owl and the Pussycat (1970), What's Up, Doc? (1972), The Way We Were (1973, opposite Robert Redford), and her 1976 lead role and producer credit in Frank Pierson's A Star Is Born.

Her parallel music career produced 36 Billboard 200 top-10 albums (the most of any 20th-century American artist) and 53 Recording Industry Association of America–certified gold and platinum albums. Her 1983 directorial debut in Yentl (which she also produced and starred in) made her the first woman to receive the Golden Globe Award for Best Director. Her 1996 film The Mirror Has Two Faces and her 2010s late-career music-album recordings (including her 2014 album Partners) have produced her 21st-century career direction. She married actor Elliott Gould in 1963 (divorced 1971) and married actor James Brolin in 1998.

Her name Barbra began as her own personally-shortened spelling of Barbara (from the Greek barbaros meaning "foreign" or "stranger"). Barbara was the third-most-popular American girls' name through the 1930s and 1940s.