Rise to Fame
She had one song in I Can Get It for You Wholesale, a comic number sung from an office chair, and stole the whole Broadway show anyway. That was 1962. Her debut album the following year won Grammy Album of the Year. Then Funny Girl happened: first on Broadway in 1964, then the 1968 film, where she played Fanny Brice with such conviction she won the Academy Award for Best Actress in her first leading screen role. She ended up collecting the full EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony) before most of her peers figured out their second act.
In the Spotlight
The 2023 memoir My Name Is Barbra ran close to 1,000 pages and debuted at #2 on the NYT Best Seller list. The self-narrated audiobook, over 48 hours long, won the 2025 Audie Award for Audiobook of the Year and earned a Grammy nomination. A multi-part documentary with Frank Marshall directing is in production. At 83, she's not staging a comeback. She's constructing the permanent record of a career that already dwarfs most institutions.
Side Notes
She had her dog Samantha cloned after her death, using cells from the dog's mouth and stomach to produce two genetic copies: Miss Scarlett and Miss Violet. She has a mall in her basement with actual storefronts and a frozen yogurt machine. The same obsessive control shows up in her work: in 1983 she became the first woman to produce, direct, star, and co-write a studio film with Yentl. Nobody assigned her all four roles. She just took them.