Barbra Streisand accepted the Life Achievement Award on the 2024 Screen Actors Guild Awards on Saturday (Feb. 24) with a heat and private speech by which she talked about her 70-year love affair with films – 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 instructed us, Streisand carried out her first main live performance in 1963. Unmentioned was the truth that Streisand gained three Grammy Awards on the Shrine within the Seventies and Nineteen Eighties. Bradley Cooper additionally helped current the award.
“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,” Streisand mentioned. “Sometimes after faculty, I’d go to the Astor Theater subsequent door to Erasmus High School the place they confirmed overseas movies in black-and-white.
“And then one Saturday, I vividly remember going to the Loew’s theater and buying a 25-cent ticket and walking into the middle of Guys and Dolls and oh my God – everything was so beautiful up on that screen – the colors, the sets, unlike our apartment where my mother covered everything with plastic. And then I saw the most beautiful actor, Marlon Brando. It was my first crush. He was so real, so believable and I wanted to be the one he fell in love with, not Jean Simmons. That make-believe world was much more pleasant than anything I was experiencing.”
Streisand was 13 when Guys and Dolls premiered in November 1955 and had such a strong impact on her goals and creativeness. There was only one downside, as Streisand defined in her speech.
“I wanted to be in the movies even though I knew I didn’t look like the other women on screen. My mother said you better learn to type, but I didn’t listen, and somehow, some way – thank God, it all came true.”
Indeed, many have credited Streisand with increasing the concept of what a film star may appear like.
Streisand gave a lot credit score to William Wyler, who directed her first movie, Funny Girl, and Harry Stradling, who was Wyler’s cinematographer. Wyler was 65 when Funny Girl 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. But, in keeping with Streisand, they have been open to her enter in a manner that she appreciates now greater than ever.
“These two men were extraordinary,” she mentioned. “They had no problem with a young woman who had opinions. I could suggest ideas for a scene to Willi and try various lighting effects with Harry and they never ever put me down. Looking back, they were really ahead of their time and that was fantastic and it set the tone for my whole career.”
Streisand additionally spoke about how appearing, and researching roles and getting ready for movies, has been her training.
“I never went to college,” she mentioned. “I always thought acting was my education. In trying to understand the character, to have to do research, immerse yourself in the period. The whole process was fascinating to me. How do you tell the story? How does the camera serve the actors in telling that story?”
Streisand understands the enchantment of films: “For a couple of hours, people can sit in a theater and escape their own troubles.”
She is also a pupil of movie historical past. “I can’t help but think back to the people who built this industry. Ironically, they were also escaping their 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 were all fleeing the prejudice they faced in Eastern Europe simply because of their religion. And they were dreamers too, like all of us here tonight. And now I dream of a world where such prejudice is thing of the past.” The final line, amid a troubling rise in antisemitic rhetoric, drew sustained applause.
Near the top of her speech, Streisand spoke of a 2022 French movie she had just lately seen, Une Belle Course (Driving Madeleine), which moved her deeply. The movie stars an actress in her 90s, Line Renaud (“so there’s still hope for us girls,” she mentioned). “It was so moving and insightful,” she mentioned. “…It reminded me over again of how much I love film.”
Streisand has mentioned that she grew to become 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, appearing appears to be her old flame. “It’s really a privilege to be part of this profession,” she mentioned at one level.
She concluded her remarks by noting: “I’d like to thank SAG-AFTRA for this fabulous honor and say to my fellow actors and directors, I’ve loved working with you and inhabiting that magical world of the movies with you. And most of all, I want to thank you for giving me so much joy – just watching all of you on the screen. Thank you for that.”
A movie package deal preceded Streisand’s arrival on stage that confirmed a lot of her prime movie moments – in addition to a memorable shock cameo in a “Coffee Talk” sketch on Saturday Night Live in 1992. The spotlight reel included many nice musical moments, akin to “Don’t Rain on My Parade” from Funny Girl, “The Way We Were” 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 by which she starred to be thought-about a contemporary and authentic tackle the perennial property.
A good variety of Streisand’s co-stars and colleagues had beforehand acquired the SAG Life Achievement Award, which underscores how far and extensive her attain extends. Walter Pidgeon, who performed Flo Ziegfeld in Funny Girl, was honored in 1975. Gene Kelly, the legendary song-and-dance man who directed her second movie, Hello, Dolly!, was feted in 1989. Robert Redford, her co-star within the basic romantic drama The Way We Were, was honored in 1996. Robert DeNiro, her co-star within the best-forgotten Meet the Fockers and Little Fockers, acquired the salute in 2020.
This 12 months’s SAG Awards streamed dwell on Netflix beginning at 8 p.m. ET/5:00 p.m. PT. Here’s a whole listing of winners.
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