source1973 : The Way We Were opensThe Way We Were, starring Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford, opens. The hit movie also produced a hit song by the same title for Streisand.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1942, Streisand aspired to enter show business from an early age. She worked as a theater usher and a switchboard operator while appearing in amateur productions. After winning a contest at a Greenwich Village nightclub, she began singing in clubs and performing in off-Broadway shows. Her Broadway debut, a small role in I Can Get It for You Wholesale (1962), stunned critics, and she won a New York Critics Award that year. She later married her co-star in the show, Elliott Gould, in 1963. The couple had a son and divorced in 1967.Streisand made TV appearances and performed at supper clubs in the early 1960s and enjoyed another Broadway triumph in 1964, when she played comedian Fanny Brice in Funny Girl. She released her first album the same year, which hit the Top 10 charts and won her the Grammy for Best Female Vocalist. CBS signed her for a series of TV specials, and her next seven albums all reached the top five.Meanwhile, she continued to make box office hits. In 1968, she won an Oscar for the film version of Funny Girl. The following year, she starred in Hello, Dolly!. Her popularity endured through the 1970s, and her 1977 song, "Evergreen," which she wrote for the movie A Star Is Born, won an Oscar. In 1983, she became the first woman to write, produce, direct, and star in a film when she adapted Isaac Bashevis Singer's novel Yentl.In the early 1990s, she overcame a debilitating stage fright that had kept her from giving large concerts, and she gave a series of sold-out performances. The album from her 1994 show at Madison Square Garden, The Concert, was another hit. In 1997, she directed herself in The Mirror Has Two Faces and released another album, Higher Ground, including a duet with Celine Dion called "Tell Him."
