Barbara Streisand (born April 24, 1942) is a singer and actress from the United States. She has achieved success in numerous sectors of entertainment throughout her six-decade career and is one of the few performers who have received an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony (EGOT).

In the early 1960s, Streisand began her career by performing in nightclubs and Broadway theatres. Following her guest appearances on various television shows, she signed with Columbia Records and released her debut, The Barbra Streisand Album (1963), which won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year. She insisted on retaining full artistic control and accepting lower pay in exchange, an arrangement that she maintained throughout her career.

What are some of the Legacies of Barbara Streisand?

Barbara Streisand has been dubbed the “Queen of the Divas” by different media sites. She was named one of America’s three most beloved divas, alongside Dolly Parton and Patti Labelle, by the New York Times.

According to Vulture, her influence ‘extends to Céline Dion, the 1980s output of Lionel Richie and Luther Vandross, and the more maudlin ballads of Mariah Carey, Adele, and Whitney Houston’.

Forbes dubbed Streisand the “Queen of the Charts” because of her unrivaled longevity on the Billboard charts. The Los Angeles Times called her the “most influential female vocalist” and the “most revolutionary of performers” for setting the norms for future female artists.

CNN named her one of the 20th century’s most romantic vocalists. Rolling Stone ranked Streisand 147th on its list of the 200 Greatest Singers of All Time in 2023. In 1997, New York magazine praised her design sense, stating that “she embarked on a surreal, chameleonic, personal fashion quest” that “she single-handedly launched the retro revolution in the 1960s.”

Meanwhile, Barbara Streisand was born in Brooklyn, New York City, on April 24, 1942, to parents Diana Ida (1908-2002 and Emanuel Streisand (1908-1943). Her mother used to be a soprano and considered a career in music before becoming a school secretary. Her father taught high school at the same school where they met. Streisand comes from a Jewish family. Her paternal grandparents came from the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s Galicia (modern-day Poland and Ukraine), and her maternal grandparents came from the Russian Empire, where her grandfather was a cantor

Streisand recalls her mother having a “great voice” and occasionally singing semi-professionally. Streisand told Rosie O’Donnell in 2016 that when she was 13, she and her mother recorded several songs on tape on a trip to the Catskills. That session was Streisand’s first time asserting herself as an artist, and it also became her “first moment of inspiration.”

She has an older brother, Sheldon, and a half-sister, singer Roslyn Kind, whom she inherited via her mother’s remarriage to Louis Kind in 1950.

When she was five years old, Streisand began her schooling at the Jewish Orthodox Yeshiva of Brooklyn. She was intelligent and inquisitive, but she lacked discipline, frequently yelling replies to questions out of turn. She then enrolled in Public School 89 in Brooklyn and began watching television and going to the movies during her elementary school years.