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Barbra Streisand is a Actor, Director, Scriptwriter, Producer and Music Supervisor American born on 24 april 1942 at Brooklyn (USA)

Barbra Streisand

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Birth name Barbara Joan Streisand
Nationality USA
Birth 24 april 1942 (81 years) at Brooklyn (USA)
Awards Officier de la Légion d'honneur, Academy Award for Best Actress, Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, Primetime Emmy Award, Daytime Emmy Award, National Medal of Arts

Barbra Joan Streisand (born April 24, 1942) is an American singer, songwriter, actress, director, and filmmaker. 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. She 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. She is among a select group of entertainers who have been honored with all the major industry prizes.

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. (The only female in the top ten, and the only artist outside of the rock 'n' roll genre.)

After beginning a successful recording career in the 1960s, Streisand ventured into film by the end of the decade. She starred in the critically acclaimed Funny Girl, for which she won the Academy Award and Golden Globe Award for Best Actress. 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. 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.

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. 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.

Biography

Relationships and family

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. In 1969 and 1970, Streisand dated Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.

She started a relationship with hairdresser/producer Jon Peters in 1974. He went on to be her manager and producer. She is the godmother of his daughters, Caleigh Peters and Skye Peters.

Streisand dated tennis champion Andre Agassi in the early 1990s. Writing about the relationship in his 2009 autobiography, Agassi said: "We agree that we're good for each other, and so what if she's twenty-eight years older? We're simpatico, and the public outcry only adds spice to our connection. It makes our friendship feel forbidden, taboo – another piece of my overall rebellion. Dating Barbra Streisand is like wearing Hot Lava."

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. Both of her husbands, Gould and Brolin, starred in the 1970s conspiracy sci-fi thriller Capricorn One.

Name
Streisand changed her name from Barbara to Barbra because, she said, "I hated the name, but I refused to change it." Streisand further explained, "Well, I was 18 and I wanted to be unique, but I didn't want to change my name because that was too false. You know, people were saying you could be Joanie Sands, or something like that. (My middle name is Joan.) And I said, 'No, let's see, if I take out the 'a,' it's still 'Barbara,' but it's unique." A 1967 biography with a concert program said, "the spelling of her first name is an instance of partial rebellion: she was advised to change her last name and retaliated by dropping an “a” from the first instead."

Politics
Streisand has long been an active supporter of the Democratic Party and many of its causes.

In 1971, Streisand was one of the celebrities listed on President Richard Nixon's infamous Enemies List.

Streisand is a supporter of gay rights, and in 2007 helped raise funds in an unsuccessful attempt to defeat Proposition 8 in California.

Philanthropy
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.

Streisand has personally raised $25 million for organizations through her live performances. 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".

In 2006, Streisand donated $1 million to the William J. Clinton Foundation in support of former President Bill Clinton’s climate change initiative.

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. In September that year, Parade magazine included Streisand on its Giving Back Fund's second annual Giving Back 30 survey, "a ranking of the celebrities who have made the largest donations to charity in 2007 according to public records", as the third most generous celebrity. The Giving Back Fund claimed Streisand donated $11 million, which The Streisand Foundation distributed. In 2012 she raised $22 million to support her women's cardiovascular center, bringing her own personal contribution to $10 million. The program was officially named the Barbra Streisand Women's Heart Center.

At Julien’s Auctions in October 2009, Streisand, a longtime collector of art and furniture, sold 526 items, with all the proceeds going to her foundation. Items included a costume from Funny Lady and a vintage dental cabinet purchased by the performer at 18 years old. The sale’s most valuable lot was a painting by Kees van Dongen. In December 2011, she appeared at a fundraising gala for Israel Defense Forces charities.