For over 40 years, award-winning American performer Barbra Streisand (born 1942) has been performing and singing on the stage, television and in motion pictures, as well as recording popular music.

Barbra Joan Streisand was born on April 24, 1942 in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York to Emanuel and Diana (Rosen) Streisand. Her father, a high school English teacher, died when Streisand was only 15 months old leaving her mother to raise both her and her older brother, Sheldon. Her mother soon found work as a secretary in the New York public school system and re-married in the late 1940s. Streisand felt rebuffed by her mother and step-father, Lou Kind, a used-car salesman, and attributes many of her personality characteristics to those early experiences. She graduated at age 16 from Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn and moved to Manhattan where she shared an apartment with friends working various jobs hoping to perform...