8 Decades of The Hollywood Reporter

For someone celebrating more than a half-century in show business — starting in 1960, when at age 18 she opened for Phyllis Diller at New York’s Bon Soir club — Barbra Streisand, 70, is having a pretty good year. Her 10-concert tour this fall grossed $31.3 million, and The Guilt Trip with Seth Rogen opens Dec. 19. But it was in the ’60s that the Brooklyn-raised daughter of a singer mother and teacher father was a showbiz meteor. The Bon Soir dates led to her 1962 Broadway debut in I Can Get It for You Wholesale, where she met husband Elliott Gould (they were married from 1963 to 1971; she wed James Brolin in 1998); the Barbra Streisand Album was 1963’s album of the year at the Grammys; 1964 brought her the defining role as Fanny Brice in Broadway’s Funny Girl; and then in 1965 came the Emmy-winning special My Name Is Barbra. When Funny Girl‘s film version came out in 1968, THR‘s review said: “Barbra Streisand bounds the final step in her phenomenal rise to superstardom.” The role brought her an Oscar in a tie with Katharine Hepburn. “Acting has been Barbra’s first love,” says Marty Erlichman, her manager since the Bon Soir days. “When she left Brooklyn for Manhattan, it wasn’t to be a singer; it was to be an actress.”