page_title: Fanny Brice
section_title: Brice portrayals
hierarchical_section_title: Fanny Brice / Legacy / Brice portrayals
caption_attribution_description: Cropped screenshot of Fanny Brice from the trailer for The Great Ziegfeld
context_page_description: Fania Borach, known professionally as Fanny Brice or Fannie Brice, was an American comedienne, illustrated song model, singer, and theater and film actress who made many stage, radio, and film appearances. She is known as the creator and star of the top-rated radio comedy series The Baby Snooks Show.
  Thirteen years after her death, Brice was portrayed on the Broadway stage by Barbra Streisand in the 1964 musical Funny Girl; Streisand also starred in its 1968 film adaptation, for which she won an Oscar, and in the 1975 sequel, Funny Lady.
context_section_description: Although the names of the principal characters were changed, the plot of the 1939 film Rose of Washington Square, in which the principal characters were portrayed by Tyrone Power and Alice Faye, was inspired heavily by Brice's marriage and career, to the extent it borrowed its title from a tune she performed in the Follies and included "My Man". Brice sued 20th Century-Fox for invasion of privacy and won the case. Producer Darryl F. Zanuck was forced to delete several production numbers closely associated with the star.
  The 1946 Warner Bros. cartoon Quentin Quail features a character based on Brice's characterization of Baby Snooks.
  Barbra Streisand starred as Brice in the 1964 Broadway musical Funny Girl, which centered on Brice's rise to fame and troubled relationship with Arnstein. In 1968, Streisand won an Academy Award for Best Actress for reprising her role in the film version. The 1975 film-sequel, Funny Lady, focused on Brice's turbulent relationship with impresario Billy Rose and was as highly fictionalized as the original film. Streisand also recorded the Brice songs "My Man", "I'd Rather Be Blue Over You (Than Happy with Somebody Else)", and "Second Hand Rose", which became a Top 40 hit.
  Funny Girl, and its sequel Funny Lady, took liberties with the events of Brice's life. They make no mention of Brice's first husband and suggest that Arnstein turned to crime because his pride would not allow him to live off Fanny and that he was wanted by the police for selling phony bonds. In reality, however, Arnstein sponged off Brice even before their marriage and was eventually named as a member of a gang that stole $5 million worth of Wall Street securities. Instead of turning himself in, as in the movie, Arnstein went into hiding. When he finally surrendered, he did not plead guilty as he did in the movie, but fought the charges, taking a toll on his wife's finances.
  In 2010, One Night with Fanny Brice, a one-woman show about Brice written and directed by Chip Deffaa and starring Kimberly Faye Greenberg premiered in New Jersey. The cast album, on the Original Cast label (OC-3831), was released in September 2010. The next production of the show, by the American Century Theatre Co. of Arlington, Virginia, starring Esther Covington, was slated to open in November 2010, directed by Ellen Dempsey.
  Though an actress does not portray Brice, her name is mentioned in three scenes of a movie that was successful at the box office and merited two Academy Award nominations: Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018). The protagonist, Lee Israel, is a biographer who hopes she can get paid to work on a project about Brice’s life.  Her literary agent Marjorie, portrayed by Jane Curtin, tells her sharply that that is not going to happen.  Marjorie shouts at Lee, “Nobody wants a book about Fanny Brice!  There is nothing new or sexy about Fanny Brice!  I couldn’t get you a ten-dollar advance for a book about Fanny Brice.”
caption: from the trailer for the film The Great Ziegfeld (1936) in which Brice appeared as herself
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