Barbra Streisand – a star at 80!
The Hollywood and musical icon's rebellious streak is something Maureen Lipman has long admired.
Such was the impact Barbra Streisand made on a teenage Maureen Lipman that she reveals in a Radio 4 documentary celebrating Streisand’s 80th birthday: “I felt her power from 3,000 miles away.” To Barbra is a mix of interviews with friends and colleagues alongside Lipman’s recollections of the star, whose late husband, the screenwriter Jack Rosenthal, worked with Streisand on her 1983 film Yentl.
“Ever since I was a teenager growing up in Hull, Barbra Streisand has been a constant in my life, alongside the Queen, my brother Geoffrey and, of course, Cliff Richard. She was a spicy accompaniment to my coming of age,” recalls Lipman, who says she first became aware of Barbra when she saw her in her brother’s Time magazine, after the actress’ breakthrough role on Broadway in the musical I Can Get it for You Wholesale.
I felt her power from 3,000 miles away.
“I would come home from school and go on a bus to town to pick up Motion Picture and Modern Screen magazines, and there was something about the shtick, the chutzpah, that went straight through to a 14-year-old girl,” she remembers. “There was Barbra, a young, kooky Jewish girl and, as a rebellious child, I felt her power from afar.”
Lipman also recalls Streisand’s refusal to play down her heritage. When she went into movies with Funny Girl, Lipman points out that: “Most of the studios were Jewish-owned, but you got there and you immediately changed your name and became as WASP as you could. Bernie Schwartz was Tony Curtis, Betty Perske was Lauren Bacall. Barbra said: ‘No, this is me.’”’
In To Barbra, her Funny Girl co-star Omar Sharif admits that: “When I first saw Barbra Streisand, I thought how terribly unattractive she was, and how will she make a career in film”, before confessing that by the end of rehearsals, he thought she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. The documentary praises Streisand’s gifts for making the ‘everywoman’ character beautiful and appealing – and points out that she appeared on the cover of Playboy, making her a certified American sex symbol.
Lipman praises her performance as Katie Morosky, opposite Robert Redford’s Hubbell Gardiner in the romantic movie The Way We Were. “That film encompassed every piece of wish fulfilment a plain girl ever had. It spoke to all of us. No woman has ever cried more tears than I did at a film than The Way We Were – I was the last in the cinema and had to be kind of flopped out.”
The documentary praises Streisand’s gifts for making the ‘everywoman’ character beautiful and appealing
Lipman eventually got to meet Streisand when her husband was working with her on Yentl, which had been in development for 15 years. “Draft 13 onwards,” she deadpans. “I used to ask him questions all the time – did she say anything, did she mention Ryan O’Neal [her co-star in two comedies], how did she look, what was she wearing? – and he never had a thing to say. She was a very ordinary, quite powerful Jewish girl, very generous in some respects and parsimonious in others.
“One day, I’d had a matinee, and had the babysitter and the kids, and got locked out of the house. There must have been a subliminal reason, so I went on the Tube to the Berkeley Hotel, where she was working with Jack, and got on the phone to her assistant and said I was his wife and could he bring down his keys.
“Then the concierge said: ‘Mrs Rosenthal, there’s a call for you.’” It was Barbra, asking her and the family upstairs.
“Adam was nearly five, and Amy was seven and she was very charming to them. I was clocking every detail; she had lovely skin, was smaller than I expected, with her hair pulled back and lovely blue eyes.
“She’d just made Memory [the song from the musical Cats] and asked if I wanted to hear it. She said to me ‘What do you think?’ and sometimes in your life you make a move, which you know will lead to the guillotine, but you can’t stop it… and I said: ‘Just one thing…’. Now the blue eyes turned straight on me and she said ‘A-ha…’ and I said: ‘Well, the middle section…is it a bit too, too… low for your voice? I mean, it’s great for your voice…’ And now I babble myself into a pit and so I usher the kids out, thank Miss Streisand very much. And I lay on the carpet outside her room, just groaning, with the kids and the babysitter, and just remembered my husband’s popping eyes as I left, and just lay there.”
Listen to To Barbra at 8pm on Saturday, 23 April, on Radio 4, and
then on BBC Sounds
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