April 16, 2002. Copyright, 2002, Graphic News. All rights reserved

Evergreen star celebrates her 60th birthday
By Mark Samms

LONDON, April 16, Graphic News:  Barbra Streisand is a glittering star in every sense of the word. Her 40-year career has been a coruscating highway paved with gold and platinum, in the form of countless discs, Grammys and Oscars.
Indeed, it is difficult to do justice to her extraordinary achievements without making it sound like a wish-list from dreamland. But the sheer weight of statistics is impossible to avoid.
She is by a massive distance the highest-selling female recording artist of all time, with 45 gold albums, 28 platinum albums, 13 multi-platinum albums, eight gold singles, five platinum singles, five gold videos, two platinum videos and one multi-platinum video. In 1967 she recorded A Christmas Album, which has entered the charts every year since and has now been officially registered as quintuple-platinum.
She has sold more albums than any other recording artist except Elvis Presley, easily out-selling The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Her albums have topped the charts over a period of 33 years, so it is hardly surprising that in a poll conducted by the world-famous news agency Reuters she was voted the favourite female singer of the 20th century.
This glorious litany represents an exceptional career achievement in itself, yet it tells only part of the story. For example, she is the only performer to win an Oscar, an Emmy, a Tony, a Grammy, a Golden Globe and the American Film InstituteÕs Lifetime Achievement Award.
Barbra Streisand likes to describe herself as a singer who acts, but she has far more than that to offer. She is also a composer, producer, writer and director. She is an accomplished businesswoman, and a star with a conscience that extends far beyond the brief, self-publicising forays favoured by some of her contemporaries to areas of war and deprivation throughout the world.
She launched the Streisand Foundation, which is devoted to human and civil rights, with a special emphasis on womenÕs equality and the protection of children at risk in society. She has used her fame to harass governments and lobby politicians, and she has never failed to put her money where her mouth is.
She donated her luxurious 24-acre Malibu estate for use as a centre for ecological studies. Over the years she has given the profit on many of her concerts to benefit everything from Bill ClintonÕs presidential campaigns to charities especially close to her heart, like those dealing with the ravages of Aids, and others attempting to improve relations between Arabs and Jews.
Today, as she approaches her 60th birthday, she has the resources, determination and settled personal life that allow her to devote even more of her time to causes in which she believes so passionately. It may be that the best of Streisand is yet to come.
/ENDS