Woman's Journal
February 1965
PERSONALITY: BARBRA STREISAND
Produced by Jeremy Banks. Photographed by Angela Williams. Written by Joan Skinner.
She has a voice that can hit you like a gale Force 8 and hammer you senseless, soar with the purity of a heavenly choir, reduce you unprotesting to helpless hysteria. Such is her genius. Variously compared with a clown, Nefertiti and an amiable anteater, her face is as mobile as her elastic-sided voice. And as irresistible. The name is Streisand. Remember it. Because we predict you'll be hearing much more of it. Twenty-two years old, Jewish and Brooklyn-born, Barbra—second A dropped to be different—was discovered four years ago singing in a Greenwich Village nightclub. As a follow-up, she sang two numbers in the musical comedy I Can Get It For You Wholesale, stopped the show with one of them and roared to the top overnight. She's still there today, on Broadway in Funny Girl, the show in which she is coming to London.
Married to actor Elliott Gould who shares her wild delight in horror films and antiques, home is twenty-one stories up between a backcloth for Steptoe and the Arabian Nights. The kitchen has black patent leather walls. Chairs in another room are draped with half-finished frocks, a desk surfaces from a flood of papers, a dentist's cabinet disgorges a miscellany of buckles and bows, the floor is six deep in magazines. The bedroom is dominated by a three-hundred-year-old four-poster bed wired for a built-in fridge and slot machine to assuage her ever present passion for coffee ice-cream and gum.
She loves clothes, mixes colours and textures of velvet and tweed, tapestry and mink with fierce abandon and eloquent effect. Understandably, she finds life more tranquil on stage than off, and believes nobody can interfere with you if you know what you want. And Barbra Streisand knows. Exactly.
End.
Photo Outtakes
Photographer Angela Williams first worked as Norman Parkinson's assistant. Parkinson was a pioneering fashion photographer. Williams' photography career is star-studded, as well, with many of her celebrity portraits held in London's National Portrait Gallery.
Ms. Williams wrote about her 1964 session with Barbra Streisand:
“She was very particular that she should select the photographs to be used by the magazine in England ...”
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