Do we like Barbra Streisand?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Decades of speaking up for LGBTQ+ people, women and the planet, with one badly worded 2019 interview and one cringey comment on the other side.
Barbra Streisand was born in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in 1942, and her father died when she was 15 months old. Her mother raised her and her older brother in near-poverty. She graduated from Erasmus Hall High School at 16 and went straight into acting classes in Manhattan, which tells you most of what you need to know about the drive.
The rise was fast. A Broadway debut in 1962 led to a Columbia Records deal, her first album won Album of the Year, and Funny Girl took her to a Best Actress Oscar in 1968. She directed Yentl in 1983, joined the small EGOT club, and got the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama in 2015.
Her big stain is a 2019 interview with The Times. Talking about the Leaving Neverland film, in which two men allege Michael Jackson abused them as a children, she said she believed them, then said they “were thrilled to be there” and it “didn't kill them”. The backlash was fierce. She apologised, saying she was “profoundly sorry” and that the printed words did not reflect her true feelings. Nothing like it turned up in the reporting we read since.
A smaller moment: in 2024 she commented on Melissa McCarthy's Instagram photo asking whether she'd taken Ozempic. She deleted it and said she “forgot the world is reading”. McCarthy brushed it off, but it was a tin-eared thing to write under a stranger's post, and it's worth a raised eyebrow, not more.
On the harm check she comes out well. Her memoir says queer people were the first to see her perform, at the Lion and the Bon Soir, and that “No one should have to live a lie.” She was executive producer of a 1995 TV movie about an Army nurse discharged for being gay. In 2017 she wrote an op-ed demanding Trump acknowledge climate change. We found no campaigning against trans people and no dodgy company she keeps.
The recent news is mostly honours and a fight she's picked on purpose. Cannes announced an honorary Palme d'Or for her in March, with the festival director calling her “above all an artist”. Her Kennedy Center statement shows she still uses her platform against a sitting president, which is a choice that costs her something with half the country.