Barbra Streisand gives moving speech for lifetime achievement award at SAGs: ‘Such a wonderful award’
Barbra Streisand accepted the Screen Actors Guild Award for life achievement at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles on Saturday.
“This is such a wonderful award to get, because you know in advance you’re gonna get it,” began Streisand, 81, at the 2024 SAG Awards. “And you don’t have to sit there and squirm.”
The singer-actor-director spoke movingly to the celebrity crowd of her early days growing up in Brooklyn with dreams of being a performer.
“I wanted to be in the movies, even though I knew I didn’t look like the other women on the screen,” she recalled. “My mother said, ‘you better learn to type.’”
Streisand went on. “I remember dreaming of being an actress as a teenager, sitting in my bed in Brooklyn with a pint of coffee ice cream and a movie magazine. Sometimes after school, I’d go to the Astor Theatre next door to Erasmus High School, which showed foreign films in black and white.”
Later, she remembered buying a 25-cent ticket to the movie-musical “Guys and Dolls,” starring Marlon Brando as Sky Masterson.
“And, oh my God, everything was so beautiful up on that screen — the colors, the sets. The sets, oh my God, unlike our apartment where my mother covered everything in plastic. And then I saw the most beautiful actor — Marlon Brando. And he was my first crush.”
“Morning Show” star Jennifer Aniston introduced the “Funny Girl” star.
“Barbra,” the actress began. “That’s all you have to say and you know. That face, that voice, that talent — it is a once-in-a-lifetime talent and how lucky that it is in our lifetime.”
Then “Maestro” nominee Bradley Cooper piled on praise.
“One might think that an actor who becomes a director has to learn to look at everything in a whole new way, to see how everything fits together, to have that 10,000-foot view,” said the fellow actor-director. “But that perspective wasn’t new for Barbra — it was second nature.”
Husband James Brolin, who she’s been married to since 1998, was their supporting his wife. Actress Anne Hathaway looked up at Streisand with tears in her eyes.
Although Streisand is the rare EGOT winner — meaning she’s taken home the Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony awards — she has never been the recipient of a SAG Award, bestowed by actors, until tonight.
Besides her success as a singer, Streisand has enjoyed a long and storied career in Hollywood.
She won the Academy Award for best actress in 1969 when she was 26 for her performance as Fanny Brice in “Funny Girl” — a role she first originated at the Winter Garden Theater on Broadway.
The actress went onto appear in many other major films throughout the 1970s, including “Hello, Dolly!,” “The Way We Were,” “What’s Up, Doc” and the remake of “A Star Is Born,” opposite Kris Kristofferson.
In 1983 she directed and starred in “Yentl,” and she made her big screen comeback as Ben Stiller’s mother and Dustin Hoffman’s wife in the 2004 comedy “Meet the Fockers.”
The “Prince of Tides” star published a 970-page memoir called “My Name is Barbra” in 2023.
When Streisand accepted the Oscar in ’69, she began her speech with Fanny Brice’s signature line: “Hello, Gorgeous!”
The actress added: “Somebody once said to me, asked me, if I was happy. And I said, ‘Are you kidding? I’d be miserable if I was happy.’ And I’d like to thank all the members of the Academy for making me really miserable. Thank you.”
