People PEOPLE Barbra Streisand

“I COULD NEVER BE IN THE CHORUS, KNOW WHAT I MEAN? I HAD TO BE A STAR BECAUSE MY MOUTH IS TOO BIG. I’M TOO WHATEVER-I-AM TO END UP IN THE MIDDLE”—BARBRA STREISAND, TIME, 1964 MEM’RIES! BARBRA’S MUSIC, MOVIES & MORE HER LIFE IN PICTURES: BROOKLYN TO BROADWAY TO STARDOM • THE DUETS: JUDY GARLAND TO ARIANA GRANDE PLUS STREISAND AS STYLE ICON: HER BEST LOOKS…

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 the fictional biopic of comedian Fanny Brice that today doubles as a documentary about the emergence of the icon in the lead role. How else to explain why Brice, a Ziegfeld Follies headliner in the 1920s, is styled in the 1960s Cleopatra eyeliner and empire-waisted gowns favored by Funny Girl’s star? 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…

AS A GIRL NO MORE THAN 5, Barbra Streisand would sit outside her apartment and entertain neighbors with tunes she’d learned from the radio and at the movies. “Growing up, I used to wonder—what did I have to do to get attention,” she told People in 1983. “When I started to sing, I got attention.” Sometimes she would sing on the stoop with other girls from their largely Jewish corner of Brooklyn, and among all of them, she would recall, “I was known as the kid who had a good voice and no father.” Barbara Joan Streisand (her parents, Emanuel and Diana, had spelled her first name the traditional way on her birth certificate) was born April 24, 1942. Her father, a schoolteacher, died from a cerebral hemorrhage when she was…

AFTER SETTLING INTO HER APARTMENT, Streisand set about the soul-crushing ritual of auditioning. Her distinctive look and thrift-shop wardrobe didn’t make things easy. “I cried in every office,” she recalled. “I was humiliated.” Resolved to become a serious actress, she delved into drama classes. What she didn’t do was sing—except around the apartment. Impressed, her roommate encouraged her to audition for musicals, but the 18-year-old thought the genre was too lightweight. While working as an usher at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, however, she became entranced by Mary Martin’s nightly brilliance in The Sound of Music. Streisand landed a touring-company audition, and though she wasn’t right for any of the roles (picture her—a von Trapp!), the casting director was blown away by her voice. Then Streisand met Barry Dennen, an actor who would…

THE ROLE INDELIBLY IDENTIFIED with Barbra Streisand—that of comedian-singer Fanny Brice—almost went to someone else. Born to Hungarian Jewish immigrants in New York in 1891, Brice (née Borach, before she took a stage name) was a star of the Ziegfeld Follies, Broadway and radio whose offstage life included a tortured marriage to suave gambler-con man Nicky Arnstein. In 1961—10 years after her death—Brice’s son-in-law, Hollywood producer Ray Stark, had an idea to turn her unpublished memoirs into a musical. Having enlisted composer Jule Styne and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, Stark hoped to cast Mary Martin—Maria von Trapp, Peter Pan!—as Brice. “You’ve gotta have a Jewish girl!” protested Sondheim (who eventually left the project and was replaced by Bob Merrill). “And if she’s not Jewish, she at least has to have a…

BACK IN 1961, BEFORE HE BECAME known as a hard-nosed newsman on 60 Minutes, Mike Wallace had a late-night talk show on NBC called PM East. Back when she was a studiously kooky striver trying to break into any kind of fame, Barbra Streisand, all of 19, was his frequent guest. Her reputation as a singer armed with offbeat wit having crept up from Greenwich Village piano bars to the more august environs of media-heavy Midtown, Streisand visited Wallace more than a dozen times from June ’61 to June ’62 (when the show ended), bantering cheekily and belting out songs like “I Stayed Too Long at the Fair” and chatting breezily with celebrity guests like Burt Lancaster. “What I found so striking about Streisand in those days (aside from her…