Barbra Streisand Lyrics

Barbra Streisand (Born Barbara Joan Streisand, April 24, 1942) is an American singer and film and theatre actress. She has also achieved note as a composer, political activist, film producer and director. Throughout her career she has won two Academy Awards, nine Grammy Awards, four Emmy Awards and a Tony Award. She is one of the very few entertainers to have won all of these honors. In 2008 she was inducted as a Kennedy Centre Honoree.

She is 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.

Since her breakthrough performance in the 1964 musical Funny Girl, Streisand has sold 140 million albums worldwide and she ranks 15th on the list of Best-Selling Artists of all time.

Streisand was born in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York. Her father, Emanuel Streisand, a high school teacher whose parents immigrated from Vienna, Austria, died from the complications of an epileptic seizure while working as the director of a Jewish summer camp in upstate New York when she was 15 months old. Starting at age seven she had a turbulent relationship with her stepfather, Louis Kind. She has a half-sister from her mother's second marriage, Roslyn Kind, who also became a singer, performing on Saturday Night Live in 1976.

Streisand's mother, Diana Ida (née Rosen), an American-born school clerk, discouraged her daughter from pursuing a show business career, opining that she was not attractive enough, and encouraged her to learn to type. Streisand attended Erasmus Hall High School, where she graduated third in her class in 1959, and where she sang in the school choir with Neil Diamond. She was also friendly there with future World Chess Champion Bobby Fischer.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbra_Streisand