Barbra Streisand, Auteur

Yentl (Barbra Streisand, 1983).

The publication of My Name Is Barbra, Barbra Streisand's 970-page memoir, has offered fans of the actress-singer-icon a long-awaited glimpse into her life. It’s a lot of book, a maximalist feast of details and anecdotes that paints a lavish portrait of the woman who became a generational star. It’s easy to forget just how much of Streisand's career was besieged by misogyny, whether it was critics' repeated derision of appearance or co-stars like Walter Matthau berating her on set. Streisand certainly never forgot, and her memoir offers frequent reminders of the sexism that hampered her path to success at every turn. Her memoir conveys an achingly detailed portrait of endurance by a wildly ambitious woman. Wherever she went, she was derided for trying to do or be “too much,” and she took pleasure in proving her detractors wrong in her inimitable style. 

When she chose to get behind the camera and direct, which was essentially unheard of for actresses at the time, the industry and media pushback was almost immediate. Indeed, decades after she made a trio of critically acclaimed and commercially successful romantic dramas, each of which landed an Oscar nomination, shattering a glass ceiling for those who followed her, Streisand’s work as a filmmaker is still frequently dismissed as a mere vanity project. Her music remains at the forefront of what fans love and expect from her, even as she has insisted for decades that she is more an actor and storyteller than a singer. 

When Streisand made her cinematic debut with an Oscar-winning performance in William Wyler’s Funny Girl (1968), she was already a multi-million-album-selling singer with a slew of TV specials to her name. She had famously negotiated recording contracts that gave her an unusual level of creative control for an emerging talent, inking her first deal at the age of 21. Winning the top honor in her field with her first film, playing the legendary comedienne Fanny Brice, was merely the icing on top of an already sizable cake. She intended to wield her newly found Hollywood power with zeal. After reading Isaac Bashevis Singer’s story “Yentl: The Yeshiva Boy” in 1968, she planned to make it her follow-up role to Funny Girl, but her agent told her that the project was too niche for her to do straight after her breakout movie, and that it would be inadvisable for her to do two explicitly Jewish stories in a row. 

Yentl (Barbra Streisand, 1983).

In 1971, she managed to get director Ivan Passer on board for the adaptation, then titled Masquerade, but he dropped out over concerns that Streisand was too old and too famous to play a young villager who disguises herself as a boy. It took until 1979 for Streisand to reach a deal to direct, produce, co-write, and star in Yentl, during which time she had become a fairly reliable box-office hit, starring in such films as What’s Up, Doc? (1972), The Way We Were (1973), Funny Lady (1975, a sequel to Funny Girl), and A Star Is Born (1976). What the studio wanted, however, was not entirely Barbra’s vision. They wanted “a Barbra Streisand movie,” as she describes in her memoir: “To them, that meant a musical, preferably, or at least a comedy.” So indelible was the brand of Barbra, the lovable singer of Broadway standards and love songs, that the industry struggled to accept her ambition without a few caveats. So, Yentl became a musical. Songwriters Alan and Marilyn Bergman partnered with Streisand to add the numbers, which she insisted would only make thematic sense if they were sung by Yentl as a stream of consciousness, to vocalize her double life. The prospect of another hit album (she had 22 already) was enough to seal the deal for United Artists.

At this time, female directors were an even smaller minority than they are today, both within the studio system and as independent artists. Between 1967 and 1980, according to Maya Montañez Smukler, author of Liberating Hollywood: Women Directors and the Feminist Reform of 1970s American Cinema, only “sixteen women made at least one feature film within the commercial U.S.-based film industry,” including Elaine May, Claudia Weill, and Joan Micklin Silver. In 1981, Sally Ogle of the New York Times wrote that the cards were unfairly stacked against the handful of women filmmakers who broke through. “When a man produces an expensive flop, he is judged as an individual and generally given another chance. When one woman fails, all women are tainted. Whatever the reason, the statistics suggest that women are being short-shifted.” Into this system came Streisand, who would not only direct, but also write, produce, and star. This was the first time a woman had taken on all of those roles on the same production. In every way, Yentl would be A Barbra Streisand Picture.

Steven Spielberg watched an early assembly of Yentl and told Streisand not to cut a thing. While his advice may have been a tad too generous—the resulting film struggles with pacing—his advice is true to the more-is-more spirit of Streisand’s vision. Yentl is simultaneously feminist parable and musical schmaltz. Streisand plays the title character, a young woman living in a Polish shtetl of the early 1900s who dreams of advancing her Jewish studies beyond what a patriarchal society will allow. After her father dies, she disguises herself as a man and enters a yeshiva under the name Anshel, where she is soon forced into a romantic entanglement with the man she desires (Mandy Patinkin) and the woman “Anshel” has been engaged to marry (Amy Irving).

Yentl (Barbra Streisand, 1983).

Isaac Bashevis Singer grumbled about Yentl and its supposed lack of “artistic merit” compared to his short story, but Streisand's version is staunchly committed to her vision. It is a curiosity as ambitious in scope as it is thematically layered. The story of a young woman forcing her way into a male-dominated world is a sharp encapsulation of Barbra's struggles, particularly in getting this film made by her own hand. The fingerprints of her prior work as an actress and singer are all over the film. It’s a star vehicle so specifically tailored to Streisand’s talents that you simply couldn’t imagine anyone else making or appearing in it. The moments of farce and physical comedy pertaining to the subversion of gender roles have their roots in her mockery of the Ziegfeld Girl mold in Funny Girl. As she notes in her memoir, the forging of female friendship when “Anshel” teaches his wife the Torah behind closed doors is rooted both in her own embrace of faith and in her opposition to Hollywood sexism. Yentl’s musical soliloquies, which come out of nowhere and focus heavily on her relationship with her father, were Streisand’s love letter to her own father, who died when she was only one year old. Even the sugar-soft lighting, inspired by Rembrandt’s paintings, which adds a dreamy air to every scene, evokes her album covers of the era. It’s a glowing romance in which Streisand has as much chemistry with Irving as she does Patinkin, though in the end Yentl rejects love in favor of her education.

In her memoir, Streisand details the studio’s reluctance for a film about Jewish identity to have three Jewish actors in the lead roles. She notes that many of the hindrances she faced as a female director were similar to her struggles to tell an explicitly Jewish story. Much of Streisand’s career has been defined by her unabashed Jewishness, and critics have mocked her nose for decades (many insults are recounted in her memoir, such as John Simon calling her nose “a ziggurat made of meat.”) Ultimately, Yentl was a box-office hit that made back double its budget in the US alone. 

United Artists—a company co-founded by a woman, Mary Pickford—put a lot of money into Yentl's Oscar campaign. This was the first time a woman-directed film was given any sort of awards push by a major studio. After winning the Golden Globe for Best Director, Streisand was assumed to be a shoo-in for a nomination. Only one woman, Lina Wertmüller, had been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director up to that point. Yet Yentl was snubbed outside of a couple of music nominations and a Best Supporting Actress nod for Amy Irving. It was seen as a pointed rejection by the Academy of Streisand's ambition. Gregg Kilday wrote for the Washington Post at the time, "The nominations were widely interpreted as a personal slap at Streisand, who had defied most of the power brokers in the movie business." Protests were held outside the theater on Oscars night in support of Barbra. Streisand admitted to feeling stung by the omission but wouldn’t comment further on it publicly, although many critics did in support. It would take until Jane Campion and The Piano in 1993 for a second woman to receive a Best Director nomination.

The Prince of Tides (Barbra Streisand, 1991).

It would be almost as long before Streisand returned to the director’s chair. For the rest of the decade she focused on music, including her first public concert appearance in twenty years. She only appeared in one film during that time, the drama Nuts (1987), which she had a hand in writing and producing (although she did not receive an official credit for the former, as she details in her book). During that time, she fell in love with the play The Normal Heart, a fiery polemic of the AIDS era written by Larry Kramer, and began the long fight to adapt it for film. In the midst of that battle, her then-boyfriend Don Johnson gave her a copy of a book he was enamored with, Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides. 

Streisand soon devoured it herself. She notes in her memoir that the story of troubled adult siblings trying to confront their dark past evoked the fates and furies of Apollo and Artemis from Greek mythology. She writes that she has “always been drawn to stories about transformation… about love and loss… and the hidden secret that can destroy your life.” In her adaptation of The Prince of Tides (1991), Tom Wingo, a teacher in South Carolina (played by a never more tender or alluring Nick Nolte), is asked to travel to New York City after his sister Savannah (Melinda Dillon) tries to commit suicide for the third time. Savannah's psychiatrist, Dr. Lowenstein (Streisand), feels that the best way to help Savannah is for Tom to offer unrestricted insight into their shared past. Yet doing so leads Tom to confront his own trauma, rooted in experiences of childhood sexual and physical abuse. Yentl is a complex study of gender and Jewishness; The Prince of Tides is a psychological tour de force. 

In his essay on The Prince of Tides for the Criterion Collection, Bruce Eder compares Streisand's direction to that of George Cukor and Wyler, the latter of whom she had worked on Funny Girl. Her deft approach to intensely emotional material certainly resonates with the women’s pictures of the ’30s and ’40s that these directors often made, films where professional and glamorous female protagonists are confronted with pain, trauma, and desires they cannot satisfy. It’s not hard to imagine Streisand’s parts in all three films being played by the likes of Joan Crawford or Barbara Stanwyck, actresses known for their balance of grit and glamor. The Prince of Tides doesn’t take the easy way out in tackling a story of generational abuse and the psychosexual unpacking of suffering. Streisand’s aesthetic is all tasteful pantsuits and soft lighting, but it does not dull the impact of Tom’s confession of having been raped as a child. Indeed, Streisand’s tender approach only emphasizes the ways that putting on a happy face won’t keep secrets hidden for long.

The Prince of Tides is the most representative of the Barbra Brand’s id. It’s a sweaty Southern Gothic set in New York, an emotionally open tale about the dangers of maintaining a stiff upper lip. Streisand’s character, guiding Tom through his recovery, also has her own demons to tackle—unlike in Yentl, where her overcoming of the odds is the major narrative thrust. Where Yentl was about feminine power and independence in the face of patriarchy, The Prince of Tides is focused on dismantling the toxic system that forces all people to deny their feelings and shove their pain away. It’s a fitting match with her songs, which are at their best when she invites the audience to weep along with her cathartic release of emotions (see “The Way We Were” or “Guilty"). Barbra, in film and music alike, wants us all to know that it’s okay to cry.

Audiences flocked to The Prince of Tides, critics were forthcoming with their acclaim, and Streisand received a Best Picture Oscar nomination as a producer (but once again, nothing as director, which led host Billy Crystal to quip during the ceremony that the movie must have made itself.) For Streisand, the omission, again, stung. Yet she writes she felt more confident because she’d proven to the doubters that she was the real deal. Roger Ebert put it succinctly in his review: “By directing one good film, you prove that you had a movie inside of you. By directing two, you prove you are a real director, and that is what Barbra Streisand proves with The Prince of Tides."

The Mirror Has Two Faces (Barbra Streisand, 1996).

In comparison to its siblings, The Mirror Has Two Faces cannot help but feel fluffier, more deliberately frivolous. It's an old-school romantic comedy, a remake of a French film not weighed down by the emotional intensity of Yentl or The Prince of Tides. Even in her memoir, the film’s production and Streisand’s thoughts on it take up far less page space than those of its predecessors (her failure to make The Normal Heart is written about with more care). The project was intended to be lighter, less of an emotional drag than her other films, and one she didn’t have to spend years of her life poring over. “I just wanted to make a movie with a happy ending,” she writes.

Certainly, the set-up of The Mirror Has Two Faces is that of a classic comedy of errors, albeit with a ’90s approach. Streisand plays Rose, a professor of English who has been told her whole life by her blousy gorgon of a mother (played by Lauren Bacall in her only Oscar-nominated performance) that she is unattractive, and forever treated as second to her vain sister. She agrees to a marriage of convenience with Gregory (Jeff Bridges), a math professor who feels that sexual attraction gets in the way of intellectual stimulation. He wants a wife with whom he can have great rapport but never have to worry about inconvenient arousal. It seems the perfect fit for Rose until she decides she wants her husband to love her completely. Cue the makeover montage.

Critics who had previously been enthusiastic about her directorial efforts lambasted the film for what was seen as an unbearable display of unfiltered ego, even from Streisand. Rose’s evolution from frumpy wallflower to confident beauty perennially bathed in sunlight seemed, as derided by Todd McCarthy in his review for Variety, to be another sign of “her career-long is-she-or-isn't-she-beautiful comic psychodrama [....] If one were to take it all seriously, one would have to point out that there just isn't that much difference in Rose Before and After, that Streisand hasn't allowed herself to look unappealing enough to justify the big change.” He's not wrong. Rose seems perfectly fine in either guise, making this one of the rare makeover movies in which the subject might have looked more radiant before than after. For Streisand, that was the point, and the film was another way to explore what she calls her fascination with beauty. “I’m interested in both the superficial aspect of appearance,” she writes, “but also the more profound question of how a woman defines herself, based on how she looks.” Richard LaGravenese's script had Rose undergo plastic surgery, which Streisand judiciously nixed. 

The Beatrice and Benedick–inspired back-and-forth hate-to-love dialogues are about the ideas of beauty and of romance in all its forms, with Streisand citing the concept of courtly love as a means to explore a story on these themes. It almost doesn’t matter what Rose or Gregory look like or how much they’ve been told that appearances are crucial to their happiness. The truth of their emotions lies in the conflict between wit and instinct, which is likewise the backbone of Streisand’s persona. When you’ve been told you’re hideous as often as she has, conveying the glow of overcoming such cruelty feels well-earned.

With the film’s climax, Barbra gets her happy ending. Rose and Gregory get their big romantic confession set piece, and Gregory is finally able to reconcile his desire for intellectual companionship with his more primal desires. He truly loves Rose for everything she is, not what he believes will satisfy him, and he fights for her. The promise of unconditional and all-encompassing love offers a good happy ending, but so does a woman getting her dues, to which all three of these films are a testament.

The Mirror Has Two Faces (Barbra Streisand, 1996).

The heroines of Streisand’s directorial efforts are united in their search for both personal and societal closure, for advancement in worlds that have doubted their abilities or hindered their growth. Through love, education, and the discovery of their own abilities, they get what they so eagerly seek. Streisand has never been sparkier or pricklier than she is in the films she directed, clearly relishing the opportunity to play the kind of vintage Hollywood roles we are always told they just don’t make like they used to. But it’s not just Barbra who thrives under Streisand’s direction. Each of her films has included Oscar-nominated performances, from Amy Irving’s gentle rebellion in Yentl and the Byronesque tortured heroism of Nick Nolte in The Prince of Tides to the giddy high-society sass of Lauren Bacall in The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996). It doesn’t hurt that each of her love interests in this trilogy is an actor at his absolute physical prime. Desire is at the forefront of her directorial works, whether it’s as an escape from patriarchal rule or a means of liberation from a dark past. There’s no other way to put it: Streisand makes horny movies.

Throughout her career, Streisand worked on many film projects that never got off the ground, including a historical biopic of Catherine the Great and a take on the musical Gypsy. After The Mirror Has Two Faces, she didn't appear on film for eight years, and mostly returned to music, as she had done after Yentl. In the memoir, the chapter on Mirror ends with her meeting her husband, James Brolin—her own happy ending. She now seems content to live a fabulous life with her basement mall and to share photos of her famous friends on Instagram. It’s a well-deserved semi-retirement for someone who spent decades breaking down barriers on stage, on screen, and in music. Still, one senses the still-untapped potential of her directorial vision and wonders what would have been had she gotten to The Normal Heart before Ryan Murphy (who adapted it for HBO in 2014), or was able to blend her film and theater skills to make a grand musical extravaganza. In her memoir, Streisand admits that her inability to make The Normal Heart is one of the most painful chapters of her life (and the most painful chapter to write) and that she still quietly hopes she might one day get to realize her version of the movie. It’s the biggest “what if?” of her career, and one that devotees of her limited filmography cannot help but consider. 

The proud maximalism and emotional rawness that made Streisand a unique performer is also what makes her directorial work so striking. Pauline Kael celebrated "the mixture of delicacy and strength" that made Streisand a singular figure in American pop culture. Her films celebrate those qualities with their dedication to telling women’s stories that take the complexity of the human heart seriously and treat it with care. The Streisandian quality lies in that earnest embrace of the sentimental, and the centering of a woman's drive and desire above all else. There is no such thing as too much, not when you have so much to say.