Streisand: The Woman and the Legend

Now 52 years old, Barbara Streisand received the highest price ever paid to a performer in one night - one million dollars on New Year's Eve in 1993 in Las Vegas. James Spada's portrait of this highly accomplished woman is also a depiction of modern American showbiz - Greenwich Village clubs in the 1960s; Broadway's brash musicals; and Hollywood in the last 30 years, when the studio system broke down when confronted by ambitious independent companies like Streisand's. Once married to actor Elliot Gould, she has had affairs with Omar Sharif, Ryan O'Neal, Warren Beatty, Steven Spielberg, Canada's former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, Richard Gere and tennis champion Andre Agassi. Although she is a multi-millionaire living in Los Angeles, she never seems to have left Brooklyn. It is her sense of reality that James Spada seeks to portray in this biography.