Actress, singer, director, writer, composer, producer, designer, activist, philanthropist Barbra Streisand is the only artist ever to receive Oscar, Tony, Emmy, Grammy, Directors Guild of America, Golden Globe, National Endowment for the Arts and Peabody Awards, as well as the American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award. She is also the first female film director to receive the Kennedy Center Honors.

She won Oscars for both Best Actress and Best Song Composer, and the three films she directed received 14 Oscar nominations. A leading film star in dramas, comedies and musicals, her latest film became the top-grossing live-action comedy ever.

She has produced albums reaching number one in four consecutive decades and is the top album-selling female recording artist. A ten-time Grammy honoree, her 50 gold albums, 30 platinum albums,18 multi-platinum albums and 29 top ten albums are all records for female singers.

Her civil rights activism and philanthropic pursuits are just as impressive. The Streisand Foundation has given millions of dollars to 700 non-profit organizations and she has raised many millions more through her performances.

The career of Barbra Streisand has been paved with bold, creative achievements and highlighted by a series of firsts.

"The Prince of Tides" was the first motion picture directed by its female star ever to receive a Best Director nomination from the Directors Guild of America as well as seven Academy Award nominations. Barbra Streisand produced the heralded drama in addition to directing and starring in it. (She and co-director Dwight Hemion won DGA Best Director honors in 1994 for her television special, “Barbra Streisand: The Concert.”) Her prior film as director, star and producer (as well as co-writer,) “Yentl,” earned five Oscar nominations and also brought her Golden Globes as both Best Director and Best Film producer.

For her very first Broadway appearance in "I Can Get It For You Wholesale," she won the New York Drama Critics Award and received a Tony nomination.
For her very first record album, "The Barbra Streisand Album," she won two 1963 Grammy Awards. One of these was Album of the Year; and she was then the youngest artist to have received that award.

For her motion picture debut in "Funny Girl," she won the 1968 Academy Award for Best Actress, the first of two Oscars. With "Yentl" in 1983, she became the first woman ever to produce, direct, write and star in a major motion picture.
She is the first female composer ever to win an Academy Award, this for her song, "Evergreen," the love theme from her 1976 hit film, "A Star Is Born." She was nominated again in 1997 as co-composer of "I Finally Found Someone," based on her love theme for her 1996 film as director/producer/star, "The Mirror Has Two Faces." The film achieved two Oscar nominations and the Best Supporting Actress Golden Globe for Lauren Bacall.

Her first television special, “My Name Is Barbra” (1965,) earned her an Emmy Award and the distinguished Peabody Award. The program received a total of five Emmys. This achievement was repeated 30 years later by "Barbra Streisand: The Concert" which won two additional Emmy awards for Ms. Streisand among the five for the production. That show also was accorded the Peabody Award, the Directors Guild of America award and three CableACE awards and it became the highest-rated musical event in HBO’s history. Her 2001 television concert special, “Barbra Streisand: Timeless. Live in Concert,” also co-directed by its star, won four more Emmys, including one for Ms. Streisand’s performance.

Recipient in 1995 of an Honorary Doctorate in Arts and Humanities from Brandeis University, she has also received from President Bill Clinton the National Medal of Arts, was accorded The Humanitarian Award from the Human Rights Campaign. and was honored by France as a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters. Additionally, French President Nikolas Sarkozy presented her with France’s Legion Of Honour.

The "actress who sings," as Streisand once termed herself, has repeatedly been at the top of the record sales charts. A detailed review of her achievements as a recording artist is provided at the end of this biography.

Ms. Streisand’s Barwood Films, through its TV arm, Barwood Television (in which she was partnered with Cis Corman,), has had award-winning success as well. In 1995, the same year as her “Barbra Streisand: The Concert" Emmy successes, “Serving In Silence: The Margarethe Cammermeyer Story," Barwood’s first television dramatic production, had six nominations and earned an additional three Emmy trophies, a total of eight Emmys for Ms. Streisand's company that year, and another Peabody Award in the process. The drama investigated military harassment of and repression of the civil rights of gays. It was acknowledged that the critically praised "Serving In Silence: The Margarethe Cammermeyer Story," would never have been realized on network television had not Barbra Streisand put her executive producing talents and considerable artistic and social-issue influence behind it.

Her Barwood Films has continued to place great emphasis on bringing to television dramatic explorations of pressing social, historic and political issues which would not otherwise be addressed in more widely viewed television movies. "Rescuers: Stories of Courage," a series of six two-part dramas on Showtime in 1997 and 1998 with great acclaim and wide viewership, pays tribute to non-Jews who heroically saved Jews from the Holocaust. The company’s 2001 telefilm, “Varian’s War,” told the story of an American Christian who got Jewish intellectuals out of occupied France. Barwood's "The Long Island Incident," which aired on NBC in May 1998, inspired a national debate on gun control with its true story of Carolyn McCarthy, a wife and mother who surmounted tragedy to win a seat in Congress after initiating a crusade to achieve sensible controls on guns.

Since resuming paid concert performance on December 31, 1993, Barbra Streisand has set a long list of records in that area as well. Following her sold-out 20 concert tour in the U.S. and Canada in 2006 and the follow-up nine concert 2007 tour of Europe, Ms. Streisand holds the house records in all 27 venues in which she has appeared in that period.

Virtually every aspect of Barbra Streisand's 1994 concert tour was record setting. Those twenty-six appearances were her first paid concerts in nearly three decades, all intervening concerts since 1966 having been fund-raisers for various social or political causes. The tour initiated with the celebrated 1994 New Year's performances at the MGM Grand Garden in Las Vegas and continued to set attendance and box-office records with immediate sellouts in London, Washington D.C., Southern California, Detroit, San Jose, and New York's Madison Square Garden. Over 5 million phone requests were recorded in the first hour when tickets for the first American leg of the tour went on sale. The tour also generated over $10.25 million for charities the artist supports, channeling money to significant causes in each locale. Reflecting Streisand's social concerns, over $3 million went to AIDS organizations, with other gifts addressing such urgencies as women and children in jeopardy, Jewish/Arab relations and agencies working to ameliorate relations between African-Americans and Jews.

Ms. Streisand's Millennium New Year's Eve concert, "Timeless," at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, December 31, 1999, set an all-time Ticket Master record for one-day sales of a single event, virtually selling out in the first few hours of sale eight months before the performance. The New Year's concert was widely covered as one of the key events of the worldwide millennium celebration.

Her two-night Madison Square Garden engagement in October 2000, and two preceding Los Angeles live appearances at Staples Center, also were record-setting successes. Similarly her second national concert tour in the Fall of 2006, received rave reviews and broke the house records in all 16 of the cities in which she had not already set the venue record. The tour, “Streisand – Live In Concert 2006”, was recorded in three sites, becoming the top-selling album of the same name. In the Spring and Summer of 2007, that show then became Barbra Streisand’s first ever concert tour of the Continent of Europe, with performances in Switzerland, France, Germany, Austria, Sweden, the United Kingdom and Ireland, a designated portion of the proceeds again being directed to charities through The Streisand Foundation. The two tours have been captured for a special DVD to be released in 2008.

Barbra Streisand’s home video releases have created records of their own. “Barbra Streisand: The Concert," became a quadruple-platinum home video as well as a triple-platinum double album (exceptionally rare for a multi-disc set). The home video/DVD of the “Timeless” concert was gold and platinum as well, with six other home videos also being certified gold. . In 2004, "Barbra Streisand - Live at the MGM Grand" was released on DVD, and was quickly certified Platinum. In November 2005, 'Barbra Streisand- The Television Specials' was released as a five-DVD box set which went quintuple (5x) platinum, within six weeks. The recent DVD release of her 1986 “One Voice” concert has joined the list of her successes in that market.

The filmmaker/entertainer was born April 24th in Brooklyn to Diana and Emanuel Streisand. Her father, who passed away when Barbra was 15 months old, was a highly respected teacher and scholar.

An honor student at Erasmus High School in Brooklyn, the teenage Streisand plunged, unassisted and without encouragement, into show business by winning a singing contest at a small Manhattan club. She developed a devout and growing following at the clubs which began hiring her, and soon she was attracting music industry attention at such spots as the Bon Soir and the Blue Angel.

Streisand signed a contract with Columbia Records in 1962, and her debut album quickly became the nation's top-selling record by a female vocalist.
Following her award-winning stage debut performance in "I Can Get It For You Wholesale," she was signed to play the great comedienne Fanny Brice in the Broadway production of "Funny Girl." When the curtain came down at the Winter Garden Theatre on March 26, 1964, the star and the show were major hits. Her distinctly original musical-comedy performance won her a second Tony nomination.

Her star on the ascent, she signed a 10-year contract with CBS Television to produce and star in TV specials. The contract gave her complete artistic control, an unheard of concession to an artist so young and inexperienced. The first special, "My Name Is Barbra," earned five Emmy Awards, and the following four shows, including the memorable "Color Me Barbra," earned the highest critical praise and audience ratings.

In 1966, Streisand repeated her "Funny Girl" triumph in London at the Prince of Wales Theatre. London critics voted her the best female lead in a musical for that season.

Few movie debuts have been as auspicious as Streisand's in Columbia Pictures' "Funny Girl.” In addition to winning the 1968 Academy Award for this performance, she won the Golden Globe and was named Star of the Year by the National Association of Theatre Owners.

After appearing in the films "Hello, Dolly!" and "On a Clear Day You Can See Forever," she starred in the non-musical comedy "The Owl and the Pussycat," released in 1970. 1972 brought another resounding comedy hit, "What's Up Doc?," followed by "Up the Sandbox," one of the first American films to deal with the growing women's movement. It was the premiere picture for her own production company, Barwood Films.

The memorable motion picture "The Way We Were" brought her a 1973 Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. The very successful "A Star Is Born," released in 1976, was the first movie to benefit from her energy and insight as a producer and won six Golden Globes. The soundtrack album topped the charts and has been certified quadruple-platinum.

Shortly after Streisand had completed her first movie, she read a short story titled "Yentl, The Yeshiva Boy" and hoped to make it her second film. However, it took 15 years of development and persistence before the dream came true.

"Yentl," a romantic drama with music, is about a courageous woman who discovers that nothing is impossible in matters of the heart and mind. It is a movie that celebrates women trying to fulfill their capabilities, not allowing traditional restrictions to deter them. The film also was the first big budget project ($15 million) which was instrumental in opening doors to women in film on a higher professional level. Streisand's directorial debut film received five 1983 Academy Award nominations, and she received Golden Globe Awards both as Best Director and as producer of the Best Picture (musical or comedy) of 1983. The 10 Golden Globes she has received throughout her career are the most achieved by any entertainment artist. In January 2000 she received that organization's coveted Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement.