May 12th, 2007 - This Day In History

May 12th, 2007 - This Day In History
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1964 : Barbra Streisand Wins Grammy

Barbra Streisand wins the Grammy Award for Best Female Vocalist for The Barbra Streisand Album.

Born in Brooklyn 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, in a small role in I Can Get It for You Wholesale (1962), stunned critics, and she won the New York Critics Award that year. She later married her co-star from 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, enjoying 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 CBS signed her for a series of TV specials. Her next seven albums all reached the Top 5. 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 the 1977 song "Evergreen," which she co-wrote with Paul Williams for the movie A Star Is Born,, won an Oscar. She became the first woman to write, produce, direct, and star in a film when she adapted Isaac Bashevis Singer's novel Yentl in 1983.

In the early 1990s, Streisand overcame debilitating stage fright, which had kept her from singing live in large venues, to perform a series of sold-out concerts. The album from her 1994 show at Madison Square Garden, The Concert, was a hit. In 1997, she directed herself in The Mirror Has Two Faces and released another album, Higher Ground, which included a duet with Celine Dion called "Tell Him." Two years later, her sold-out New Year's Eve concert in Las Vegas became one of the city's highest-grossing single concerts ever.
Published 5/11/07 by


Allie Is Wired

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