Barbra Streisand ( STRY-sand; born Barbara Joan Streisand, April 24, 1942) is an American singer and film and theatre actress. She has also achieved note as a composer, political activist, film producer and director. She has won two Academy Awards, nine Grammy Awards, four Emmy Awards and a Tony Award. She is one of the very few entertainers to have won all of these honors, although she has yet to win a competitive Tony Award. In 2008 she was inducted as a Kennedy Centre Honoree.

She is one of the most commercially and critically successful female entertainers in modern entertainment history and one of the best selling solo recording artists in the US, with RIAA-certified shipments of over 71 million albums. She is the highest ranking female artist on the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) Top Selling Artists list.

Since her breakthrough performance in the 1964 musical Funny Girl, Streisand has sold 140 million albums worldwide and she ranks 15th on the list of Best-Selling Artists of all time.

Early years

Streisand was born in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York. Her father, Emanuel Streisand, a high school teacher whose parents immigrated from Vienna, Austria, died from the complications of an epileptic seizure while working as the director of a Jewish summer camp in upstate New York when she was 15 months old. Starting at age seven she had a turbulent relationship with her stepfather, Louis Kind. She has a half-sister from her mother's second marriage, Roslyn Kind, who also became a singer, performing on Saturday Night Live in 1976.

Streisand's mother, Diana Ida (née Rosen), an American-born school clerk, discouraged her daughter from pursuing a show business career, opining that she was not attractive enough, and encouraged her to learn to type. Streisand attended Erasmus Hall High School, where she graduated third in her class in 1959, and where she sang in the school choir with Neil Diamond. She was also friendly there with future World Chess Champion Bobby Fischer.

Early years

After a music competition, Streisand became a nightclub singer while in her teens. She originally wanted to be an actress and appeared in summer stock and in a number of Off-Off-Broadway productions, including Driftwood (1959), with a then-unknown Joan Rivers. (In her autobiography, Rivers wrote that she played a lesbian with a crush on Barbra's character, but this was later refuted by the play's author.) Driftwood ran for only six weeks. When her boyfriend Barry Dennen helped her create a club act—first performed in The Lion, a gay bar in Manhattan's Greenwich Village in 1960—she achieved success as a singer. In 1961 Streisand appeared at the Town and Country nightclub in Winnipeg, Manitoba, but her appearance was cut short; audiences did not understand her revolutionary singing style.

Streisand's first television appearance was on The Tonight Show, then hosted by Jack Paar, in 1961. Orson Bean, who substituted for Paar that night, had seen the singer perform at a gay bar and booked her for the telecast. Streisand became a semi-regular on P.M. East P.M. West, a talk/variety series hosted by Mike Wallace, in late 1961. Westinghouse Broadcasting, which aired P.M. East P.M. West in a select few cities (Boston, New York, Baltimore, Washington, DC, Cleveland, Chicago and San Francisco), has since wiped all the videotapes, due to the cost of videotape at the time. Audio segments from some episodes are part of the compilation CD Just for the Record, which went platinum in 1991. The singer said on 60 Minutes in 1991 that thirty years earlier Mike Wallace had been "mean" to her on P.M. East P.M. West. He countered that she had been "self-absorbed." 60 Minutes included the audio of Streisand saying to him in 1961, "I like the fact that you are provoking. But don't provoke me."