Sunday, March 23, 2008

Barbara Streisand

I've been called many names like perfectionist, difficult and obsessive. I think it takes obsession, takes searching for the details for any artist to be good.

There is nothing more important in life than love.
Barbara Streisand

Barbra Joan Streisand (pronounced STRY-sand, IPA: /ˈstraɪsænd/; born April 24, 1942) is a two time Academy Award-winning American singer and film and theatre actress. She has also achieved some notability as a composer, political activist, film producer and director. She has won Oscars for Best Actress and Best Original Song as well as multiple Emmy Awards, Grammy Awards, and Golden Globe Awards.

She is considered 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.

She has sold approximately 145 million albums worldwide.[citation needed]From a period beginning in 1969 and ending in 1980, Streisand appeared in the annual motion picture exhibitors poll of Top 10 Box Office attractions a total of 10 times, often as the only woman on the list. But after the disappointment of All Night Long in 1981, Streisand's film output decreased considerably. She has only acted in five films since.

Streisand produced a number of her own films, setting up Barwood Films in 1972. For Yentl (1983), she was producer, director, writer, and star, an experience she repeated for The Prince of Tides (1991). Steven Spielberg called Yentl a masterpiece, and both won critical acclaim. There was controversy when Yentl received five Academy Award nominations but none for the major categories of Best Picture, Actress, or Director. Prince of Tides received even more nominations, including Best Picture, but the director was not nominated.

In 2004, Streisand made a return to film acting, after an eight-year hiatus, in the comedy Meet the Fockers (a sequel to Meet the Parents), playing opposite Dustin Hoffman, Ben Stiller, Blythe Danner and Robert De Niro. Meet the Fockers is the highest grossing comedy film in history.

Barbra has made only 17 films in her 40 year movie career, this however hasn't stopped her accumulative worldwide box office total being over 1.3 billion US Dollars.

Streisand has long been an active supporter of the Democratic Party and many of its causes, such as working against global warming, supporting gun control (she executive-produced the film The Long Island Incident, about a mass shooting on the Long Island Railroad), getting more useful aid for victims of Hurricane Katrina, and questioning the motives behind the 2003 invasion of Iraq. She also strongly supports women's reproductive rights. Barbra Streisand performed both at Lyndon B. Johnson's (1965) and Bill Clinton's (1993) inauguration galas. On November 27, 2007, Streisand endorsed 2008 presidential candidate Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Source

Visit her web site here.

Read more about her here, here and here.

1 comment:

Dianne said...

I have always been a big fan of Babs!