Hello, Gorgeous: the timeless, luminous allure of Barbra Streisand’s Funny Girl
To celebrate 100 years of Columbia Pictures, John Forde examines the deep impact of William Wyler’s Funny Girl, from the queer appeal of Barbra Streisand to the rise and fall of the Hollywood musical.
At this year’s SAG Awards, Hollywood stood to applaud Barbra Streisand—actress, singer, filmmaker and icon—as she accepted a Lifetime Achievement Award. In her speech, Streisand, now 82 years old, spoke about the good fortune of her film debut in Funny Girl: the role that won her an Oscar.
Based on the hit stage musical of the same name, Funny Girl tells the true-life story of Fanny Brice (Streisand), a singer who rose from humble beginnings to star in the Ziegfeld Follies, while falling in love with handsome but unreliable gambler Arnstein (Omar Sharif). A box office sensation, Funny Girl was one of 1968’s highest-grossing films, catapulting Streisand to global stardom. The soundtrack became a bestseller; its musical numbers are now classics of the Great American Songbook. “No song in the history of music slaps harder than ‘Don’t Rain on my Parade’,” Ele declares of the film’s best-known anthem, “and no, I will not be taking criticism.”
In 1969, Funny Girl was nominated for seven Oscars, second only to eventual Best Picture winner, British musical Oliver!. In a fun twist of events, Streisand tied for Best Actress in a Leading Role with an absent Katharine Hepburn (for her performance in The Lion in Winter). Resplendent in a sequinned pantsuit, Streisand became the first actress to accept an Oscar wearing trousers. Looking down at her little gold man, she purred, “Hello, gorgeous,” (one of Brice’s most famous lines), to peals of audience laughter.
These days, Funny Girl seems in need of rediscovery. It’s been logged a mere 61,000 times on Letterboxd—admittedly with a glittering 3.9 ranking. Fans of the picture are fiercely devoted, as Laura writes, “Barbra performs with every muscle & we’re just puppets tied to her every move!”, while Sarah speaks for many when she declares, “how is it even possible for a film to make me feel every single emotion imaginable?? It’s 2 a.m., I’m a mess, and I love Barbra Streisand more than anything!!”
Funny Girl’s legacy isn’t easy to assess. The film landed at a curious junction in Hollywood history, as old-school production values were giving way to an edgy new generation of filmmakers. By the 1960s, Hollywood was in decline, losing revenue to the growing popularity of television. In an attempt to lure audiences back into cinemas, movie studios relied on the same model that bankrolled them through the Great Depression: lavish musical extravaganzas, typically based on successful stage shows.
During this decade, four musicals became box-office hits and won Best Picture Oscars: West Side Story, My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music and Oliver!. Among these classics, Funny Girl stands as one of the last great mid-century Hollywood musicals, before the genre took a nose-dive for the next three decades. It’s also a perfect showcase for Streisand, a trailblazing polymath who would become a marked inspiration for many Hollywood ascenders.
The story of Funny Girl is one of Hollywood’s happiest examples of the right material finding the right leading lady at the right time. After dazzling Broadway in the 1962 musical I Can Get It for You Wholesale, the nineteen-year-old Barbra Streisand caught the eye of composer Jule Styne. Impressed, he crafted a new musical with her in mind—Funny Girl—alongside lyricist Bob Merrill and playwright Isobel Lennart. Streisand was uniquely suited for the role: like Brice, she was a nice Jewish girl from the slums of New York and an “unconventional” beauty (more on that later), whose wit, talent and determination propelled her to early success.
Funny Girl landed on Broadway in 1964, becoming a monster hit and running for almost two years. Streisand became a star of Beyoncé-sized proportions, aided by her Emmy-winning 1965 TV special My Name Is Barbra and a now-legendary duet with Judy Garland, the peerless star of MGM musicals The Wizard of Oz and Meet Me in St. Louis.
Inevitably, Hollywood came calling, though Streisand wasn’t the first choice for the Funny Girl movie. Columbia Studios initially wanted a more established star like Shirley MacLaine, until producer Ray Stark (the real-life Brice’s son-in-law) insisted that he wouldn’t make the film without Streisand. Thankfully, she won the role, giving what Andi calls, “One of the best debut performances in the world of film.”
Streisand’s performance is so assured that it’s easy to forget how difficult her job was. The role of Fanny Brice requires an unusual combination of talents: a huge vocal range to reach the top notes of Styne’s songs; the comic timing of Groucho Marx; dramatic chops to plumb the character’s emotional depths. Streisand delivered, with the help of a dream team of filmmakers.
Veteran film director William Wyler, who had already nurtured the careers of Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland and Audrey Hepburn, had never made a musical before. Sensibly, he deferred to Streisand, treating her as a collaborator and giving her room to express her idiosyncratic gifts. “We collaborated from day one because he knew that I knew this character,” Streisand writes in her best-selling 2023 memoir My Name Is Barbra. “He always made me feel part of the process.” Wyler encouraged her to become a filmmaker, even giving her a director’s megaphone stamped “Barbra Streisand DGA [Directors Guild of America]”. Making good on Wyler’s faith in her, she went on to write, direct and star in her own features, including the Oscar-nominated Yentl and The Prince of Tides.
In Funny Girl, cinematographer Harry Stradling (Guys and Dolls, My Fair Lady) lensed Streisand like a silent movie star, highlighting her Nefertiti-like profile and wonderful Cubist nose. Irene Sharaff’s vibrant costumes track Brice’s evolution from awkward teenager to Broadway sensation, including her iconic leopard-print coat and several marvelous hats.
Much of Funny Girl’s humor comes from Brice’s insecurity about her looks, which she leans into for comic effect. When required to sing in a wedding pageant, she stuffs a pillow under her gown and plays it for laughs as a pregnant bride. Later, she explains to her enraged boss Florenz Ziegfeld (Walter Pidgeon), “I couldn’t do it straight as if I thought I was one of those [beautiful] girls. The [audience] would’ve laughed at me. It was my joke, you see? They laughed with me, not at me, because I wanted them to laugh.”
That line is critical to understanding Brice—and Streisand, and every woman who uses humor to deflect criticism about her appearance. For a modern-day example, think Amy Schumer, whose comedy frequently mocks her physique: “My arms look so big, people think they’re legs”, she jokes in her 2015 comedy special Live at the Apollo.
Much of this humor stings, especially for modern audiences. Megan writes: “[It’s] insane to believe [Barbra] Streisand was cast as a ‘not conventionally attractive’ character and has to call herself ugly this entire movie….!!!!” But therein lies Streisand’s gifts as a performer, and the key to Funny Girl’s enduring appeal. It’s what Brice thinks about herself that matters, and how she deals with her insecurities—shrugging off insults with jokes—that makes Funny Girl so poignant. Streisand continued playing awkward meeskites throughout her career: In The Way We Were, she makes light of bedding the gorgeous Robert Redford; in The Mirror Has Two Faces (which she also co-wrote and directed), she hits the gym and gets a makeover to arouse her celibate boyfriend Jeff Bridges.
True to its title, Funny Girl is about Brice discovering that humor can be a drawcard as well as a defense mechanism. In one of Streisand’s best moments of physical comedy, Brice hijacks a roller-skating chorus audition, lurching about like a giraffe and knocking down the other dancers like ninepins. Slowly, she realizes that the audience is laughing. She stops, delightedly drinking in the applause. A new star is born.
Unusually for romantic comedies, Funny Girl lets its heroine have her career and find a gorgeous man. Sharif, best known as the tragic hero of Doctor Zhivago, is wonderful as Arnstein, a charmer who romances Brice only to break her heart. “Nick Arnstein is trash,” Hannah writes, “but can we all agree that Omar Sharif is a snack?” Though Sharif was the more established star, he happily plays second fiddle to Streisand’s Brice, who jokes that, “The groom was prettier than the bride.” Streisand and Sharif had an off-screen affair during filming, which may well have helped their on-screen chemistry. Kaylatarack confesses: “this movie was my sexual awakening. heyyyy omarrrr.” Oy vey!
Like many larger-than-life divas, Streisand’s appeal expands beyond gender and sexuality. From the start of her career, she was a hit with gay men, who claimed her as a fellow outsider. One of her earliest gigs was opening for the fabulously camp cabaret singer Liberace in his 1963 Las Vegas show, endearing her to both Midwestern moms and dads and their musical-loving gay sons. (Ashton writes that Streisand “could command an army of gays just by singing a showtune.”) Although her queer credentials were confirmed by playing a cross-dressing female rabbi in 1983’s Yentl, a similar queer subtext lurks, deliciously, in Funny Girl.
As Brice, Streisand performs her femininity by parodying the impossible beauty standards of show-business. In one delicious scene, she pastes on a fake smile and poses for the paparazzi, parodying the glamor poses of Hollywood starlets. “It’s all a joke,” she seems to be saying, “and I’m in on it.” Streisand enacts a similar strategy to many drag queens, playing a lively version of a woman, punctuated with over-the-top poses and ironic asides.
Streisand became a muse for drag performers, most notably Steven Brinberg, whose “Simply Barbra” show has played for more than 30 years (as Brinberg impishly explains, offering Streisand to audiences at more affordable prices). More recently, RuPaul’s Drag Race star Plasma recreated the ‘Don’t Rain on My Parade’ scene from Funny Girl—proving how Streisand-as-Brice continues to inspire queer fans around the world to be their authentic selves.
Unusually for Hollywood, Funny Girl spins a Cinderella story that examines the other side of Happily Ever After. Midway through the film, Brice achieves her dream of becoming Mrs. Arnstein (“Sadie, Sadie, married lady,” she sings), and settles down to suburban wedded bliss with their young daughter. After Arnstein gambles the family’s fortune away and is imprisoned for fraud, Brice is forced to accept that, while the two still love each other, their happy marriage is a sham.
Realizing that she has to give Arnstein up, she sings ‘My Man’, a ballad made famous by the real-life Brice. What Streisand does with the song—and how she and Wyler chose to film it—moves Funny Girl into something epic. Streisand had the idea of wearing a black dress against a black backdrop, lit by a single spotlight so that only her face and hands are visible. It’s simple but effective, making Streisand both part of the set and the scene’s sole special effect.
As Streisand begins, “Oh, my man, I love him so / He’ll never know”, she’s teary-eyed, struggling to find the words. Slowly, she finds inner courage, turning the song into a manifesto—her ability to love becomes her strength, not her weakness. When she hits her final glorious top note, she thrusts her arms towards the camera, tilts her head back and closes her eyes as the scene cuts to black. She’s a woman reborn: at last, the Funny Girl has stopped trying to make ’em laugh, learning instead to believe in herself.
“Barbra’s arm and hand movements [are] emotional lightning rods,” Tess declares, “and I can confirm that this film electrocuted me.” It’s not just lightning Streisand channels, but her old pal Judy Garland: a showbiz legend who poured her suffering into her music, loved the wrong men and died too young.
Streisand, too, has been a survivor. She learned from Garland the importance of managing her own career and not allowing herself to be exploited. Her nearly 60-year run of stardom is notably un-Garland-like: no drug addictions or nervous breakdowns; a long-standing marriage to her second husband James Brolin; a warm relationship with her son Jason Gould (co-parented with first husband Elliott Gould), who frequently performs with her in concert. She’s a diva without the tragedy that consumed Garland, or more recent examples like the great Amy Winehouse. Streisand’s pioneering efforts paved the way for other singers to transition to acting (Beyoncé has cited—and quoted—Streisand as a formative influence) and inspired actresses including Greta Gerwig to direct and produce their own films. (Streisand, too, was once snubbed for a Best Director Oscar.)
Despite what seems like universal love for Funny Girl, not everyone was impressed. Critics including Pauline Kael were dazzled by Streisand, but slammed the film’s kitschy production values and lack of relevance as the world was wrestling with the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement for Black Americans and the emergence of second-wave feminism.
It’s true: the aesthetic and tone of Funny Girl seems old-fashioned when compared with other pictures made in the same period. While Streisand was singing the Victorian music-hall song ‘Second Hand Rose’ under soft-focus lighting, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway were on the run in Bonnie and Clyde, Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft were having a joyless affair in The Graduate, Mia Farrow was being impregnated by Satan in Rosemary’s Baby and robot HAL 9000 was showing his contempt for humanity in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Narratively challenging and aesthetically radical, these films seemed to speak to the turbulence of 1960s America better than any musical could.
By the 1970s, musicals were in the dustbin, deemed too extravagant for audiences craving gritty realism. The few outliers that made money were Bob Fosse’s noirish, sexually charged Cabaret, and Funny Lady, the Streisand-starring 1975 sequel to Funny Girl. It wasn’t until the early 2000s that Hollywood learned to love (and bankroll) the musical again. The one-two punch of Baz Luhrmann’s manic jukebox show-stopper Moulin Rouge! and Rob Marshall’s sizzling adaptation of Chicago were both critical and commercial hits. In 2001, Chicago won the Best Picture Oscar—the first musical film to do so since 1969, the year of Oliver! and Funny Girl.
What accounts for the genre’s revival is difficult to pinpoint—Hollywood loves anything that turns a profit, after all. At their best, Moulin Rouge! and Chicago gave Y2K audiences the same joy that Funny Girl gave their parents in the 1960s—watching supremely talented performers telling a story with dance, music and theatrical effects, creating the kind of rapture that’s hard to get from mumblecore, kitchen-sink realism or action movies.
The key to Funny Girl’s enduring appeal is, in a word, Streisand—who Seanoconnz calls, “maybe the most charismatic person in the history of film.” Her persona and singular beauty shook up Hollywood’s expectations of movie stardom. Too smart to be an ingénue, too goofy to be a bombshell and too talented to be anything other than a leading lady, she became her own genre—Barbra—which no other performer, except perhaps Cher and Liza Minnelli, came close to.
Streisand’s performance in Funny Girl cast such a long shadow that it took Broadway nearly six decades to mount a revival. In 2017, Lady Bird star and self-confessed Streisand superfan Beanie Feldstein took on the role. Her successor was Lea Michele, whose part as Streisand-obsessed Rachel Berry in the TV show Glee was essentially a six-year-long audition to play Fanny Brice. Liv jokes, “I can’t believe they made a whole movie about that song from Glee!!! Rachel Berry’s impact,” which hopefully Ms. Streisand will never read.
What Funny Girl proved is that movie heroines can be complex, unconventional and still captivating. Streisand’s performance as Brice lives on in nearly every Hollywood movie about quirky, self-deprecating women who unexpectedly find love and success. These may well include Bette Midler as a quirky Jewish girl who becomes a torch-song singer in Garry Marshall’s Beaches and Nia Vardalos’s accidental romantic heroine in My Big Fat Greek Wedding from 2002. Sarah Jessica Parker, star of Sex and the City, iterated on Streisand’s appeal as an unconventional and free-spirited career woman: the end of the show’s third season even includes a fun homage to Streisand in the weepy finale of romantic drama The Way We Were (“Your girl is lovely, Hubble”). And before she became the Gen-Z Funny Girl, Feldstein was channeling Streisand in Lady Bird, playing Julie the wallflower with the glorious voice who lands the lead in the school musical.
Most recently, Lady Gaga was best placed to take care of Streisand’s crown. In 2018’s A Star Is Born remake, she played the same role brought to life by both Judy Garland and Streisand in earlier versions of the story. Gaga’s Ally, a singer who’s told that her nose will prevent her from becoming a star, pays a witty tribute to Streisand’s self-deprecating jokes in Funny Girl. Her impassioned performance of ‘Shallow’ made the song a hit independently of the film—a feat Streisand pulled off with ‘People’ and ‘Don’t Rain on My Parade’ in Funny Girl.
What made Gaga’s performance so powerful was the discarding of her well-established and mold-breaking pop star persona to reveal a more vulnerable truth—something Streisand has done effortlessly as an actress, singer and filmmaker throughout her career. Of Funny Girl, Kellie writes, “[Streisand] doesn’t just sing the songs, she feels them. No one can emote like her.”
Nearly 60 years since its release, Funny Girl continues to inspire movie lovers. In a cinematic universe in which audiences crave complex and relatable female characters, who could be more inspiring than Fanny Brice—a “bagel on a plate of onion rolls”—who finds fame, love, heartbreak and, finally, herself? Cecelabowe says, “[Funny Girl] instilled such a confidence in me at such a young age to not be afraid to take up space and be loud and strong and silly and more of myself on and off the stage. I owe it all to Babs.”
At their best, movies, especially movie musicals, can create bonds across generations. “[M]y mom saw [Funny Girl] multiple times in theaters when she was a kid and it was one of her favorite films,” Nora explains. “[I] got to see this for the first time with her today and it was so great and my mom knew the words to every song. I love my mom and I love Barbra Streisand!!!!” We hear you, Nora. People who see Funny Girl, with their moms or even flying solo, are the luckiest people in the world.
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