page_title: Barbra Streisand
section_title: Career beginnings
hierarchical_section_title: Barbra Streisand / Career beginnings
caption_attribution_description: Barbra Streisand
context_page_description: Barbara Joan "Barbra" Streisand is an American singer, actress, and filmmaker. In a career spanning six decades, she has achieved success in multiple fields of entertainment and became one of few entertainers who have been honored with an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony Award.
  Streisand began her career by performing in nightclubs and Broadway theaters in the early 1960s. Following her guest appearances on various television shows, she signed to Columbia Records and released her debut album, The Barbra Streisand Album. It won two Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year. Throughout her recording career, Streisand has topped the US Billboard 200 chart with 11 albums—a record for a woman—including The Way We Were, A Star Is Born soundtrack, and Guilty. She has amassed five number-one singles on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart: "The Way We Were", "Evergreen", "You Don't Bring Me Flowers", "No More Tears", and "Woman in Love".
  After becoming an established recording career artist in the 1960s, Streisand ventured into film by the end of that decade. She starred in the critically acclaimed Funny Girl, for which she won the Academy Award and Golden Globe Award for Best Actress.
context_section_description: Aged 16 and then living on her own, Streisand took various menial jobs to have some income. During one period, she lacked a permanent address, and found herself sleeping at the home of friends or anywhere else she could set up the army cot she carried around. When desperate, she returned to her mother's flat in Brooklyn for a home-cooked meal. However, her mother was horrified by her daughter's "gypsy-like lifestyle", wrote biographer Karen Swenson, and again begged her to give up trying to get into show business, but Streisand took her mother's pleadings as even more reason to keep trying: "My desires were strengthened by wanting to prove to my mother that I could be a star."
  She took a job as an usher at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater for The Sound of Music early in 1960. During the run of the play, she heard that the casting director was auditioning for more singers, and it marked the first time she sang in pursuit of a job. Although the director felt she was not right for the part, he encouraged her to begin including her talent as a singer on her résumé when looking for other work.
  She asked her boyfriend, Barry Dennen, to tape her singing, copies of which she could then give out to possible employers. Dennen found a guitarist to accompany her:
  We spent the afternoon taping, and the moment I heard the first playback I went insane ... This nutty little kook had one of the most breathtaking voices I'd ever heard ... when she was finished and I turned off the machine, I needed a long moment before I dared look up at her.
  Dennen grew enthusiastic and he convinced her to enter a talent contest at the Lion, a gay nightclub in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. She performed two songs, after which there was a "stunned silence" from the audience, followed by "thunderous applause" when she was pronounced the winner. She was invited back and sang at the club for several weeks. It was during this time that she dropped the second "a" from her first name, switching from "Barbara" to "Barbra", due to her dislike of her original name.
caption: Streisand, c. 1962
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