Barbra Streisand accepted the Life Achievement Award on the 2024 Display Actors Guild Awards on Saturday (Feb. 24) with a heat and private speech wherein she talked about her 70-year love affair with motion pictures – a ardour which started as a strategy to escape a colorless upbringing in Brooklyn.
The award was a spotlight of the thirtieth annual SAG Awards, which have been introduced on the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles – the place, presenter Jennifer Aniston informed us, Streisand carried out her first main live performance in 1963. Unmentioned was the truth that Streisand received three Grammy Awards on the Shrine within the Seventies and Nineteen Eighties. Bradley Cooper additionally helped current the award.
“I bear in mind dreaming of being an actress as a teen sitting in my mattress in Brooklyn with a pint of espresso ice cream and a film journal,” Streisand mentioned. “Generally after faculty, I’d go to the Astor Theater subsequent door to Erasmus Excessive Faculty the place they confirmed overseas movies in black-and-white.
“After which one Saturday, I vividly bear in mind going to the Loew’s theater and shopping for a 25-cent ticket and strolling into the center of Guys and Dolls and oh my God – all the pieces was so lovely up on that display screen – the colours, the units, in contrast to our condo the place my mom coated all the pieces with plastic. After which I noticed essentially the most lovely actor, Marlon Brando. It was my first crush. He was so actual, so plausible and I wished to be the one he fell in love with, not Jean Simmons. That make-believe world was way more nice than something I used to be experiencing.”
Streisand was 13 when Guys and Dolls premiered in November 1955 and had such a robust impact on her desires and creativeness. There was only one downside, as Streisand defined in her speech.
“I wished to be within the motion pictures although I knew I didn’t appear like the opposite ladies on display screen. My mom mentioned you higher study to kind, however I didn’t pay attention, and one way or the other, a way – thank God, all of it got here true.”
Certainly, many have credited Streisand with increasing the concept of what a film star might appear like.
Streisand gave a lot credit score to William Wyler, who directed her first movie, Humorous Woman, and Harry Stradling, who was Wyler’s cinematographer. Wyler was 65 when Humorous Woman was filmed in 1967. Stradling was 66. They have been at an age, and in an period, the place many males of their positions would have resented a 25-year-old newcomer to movie who was brimming with concepts. However, in line with Streisand, they have been open to her enter in a means that she appreciates now greater than ever.
“These two males have been extraordinary,” she mentioned. “They’d no downside with a younger lady who had opinions. I might counsel concepts for a scene to Willi and take a look at numerous lighting results with Harry they usually by no means ever put me down. Wanting again, they have been actually forward of their time and that was implausible and it set the tone for my complete profession.”
Streisand additionally spoke about how performing, and researching roles and making ready for movies, has been her schooling.
“I by no means went to school,” she mentioned. “I all the time thought performing was my schooling. In making an attempt to grasp the character, to need to do analysis, immerse your self within the interval. The entire course of was fascinating to me. How do you inform the story? How does the digicam serve the actors in telling that story?”
Streisand understands the enchantment of films: “For a few hours, folks can sit in a theater and escape their very own troubles.”
She is also a pupil of movie historical past. “I can’t assist however assume again to the individuals who constructed this business. Satirically, they have been additionally escaping their very own troubles.”
She talked about Samuel Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer and the Warner Brothers, all of whom had modified their names to be much less ethnic-sounding. “They have been all fleeing the bias they confronted in Jap Europe merely due to their faith. They usually have been dreamers too, like all of us right here tonight. And now I dream of a world the place such prejudice is factor of the previous.” The final line, amid a troubling rise in antisemitic rhetoric, drew sustained applause.
Close to the top of her speech, Streisand spoke of a 2022 French movie she had not too long ago seen, Une Belle Course (Driving Madeleine), which moved her deeply. The movie stars an actress in her 90s, Line Renaud (“so there’s nonetheless hope for us women,” she mentioned). “It was so transferring and insightful,” she mentioned. “…It jogged my memory over once more of how a lot I like movie.”
Streisand has mentioned that she turned a singer as a result of she couldn’t get a job as an actress. For all of the success she has had as a singer, performing appears to be her old flame. “It’s actually a privilege to be a part of this career,” she mentioned at one level.
She concluded her remarks by noting: “I’d wish to thank SAG-AFTRA for this fabulous honor and say to my fellow actors and administrators, I’ve beloved working with you and inhabiting that magical world of the films with you. And most of all, I need to thanks for giving me a lot pleasure – simply watching all of you on the display screen. Thanks for that.”
A movie bundle preceded Streisand’s arrival on stage that confirmed a lot of her high movie moments – in addition to a memorable shock cameo in a “Espresso Speak” sketch on Saturday Night time Stay in 1992. The spotlight reel included many nice musical moments, akin to “Don’t Rain on My Parade” from Humorous Woman, “The Approach We Have been” from that movie and “Evergreen” from the 1976 model of A Star Is Born.
Cooper, who directed the 2018 remake of A Star Is Born, was beneficiant to assist introduce Streisand. In 2021, Streisand threw some shade at his remake, saying it was too near the rock’n’roll replace wherein she starred to be thought of a contemporary and unique tackle the perennial property.
A good variety of Streisand’s co-stars and colleagues had beforehand obtained the SAG Life Achievement Award, which underscores how far and vast her attain extends. Walter Pidgeon, who performed Flo Ziegfeld in Humorous Woman, was honored in 1975. Gene Kelly, the legendary song-and-dance man who directed her second movie, Whats up, Dolly!, was feted in 1989. Robert Redford, her co-star within the traditional romantic drama The Approach We Have been, was honored in 1996. Robert DeNiro, her co-star within the best-forgotten Meet the Fockers and Little Fockers, obtained the salute in 2020.
This yr’s SAG Awards streamed stay on Netflix beginning at 8 p.m. ET/5:00 p.m. PT. Right here’s an entire checklist of winners.
