Now age 81, Vanity Fair November cover star Barbra Streisand has led dozens of beloved films, including Funny Girl, The Way We Were, and A Star Is Born. But there are many other famous roles that the Oscar winner turned down, as she recalled in a recent interview with Howard Stern.

These include a part in 1974’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, a Martin Scorsese film that went on to star Ellen Burstyn as the titular character. “I’m so sorry I didn’t take that role,” Streisand said she wrote to Scorsese after rewatching Goodfellas. About a decade later, she declined a part in Ron Howard’s Splash, the aquatic comedy starring Tom Hanks and Daryl Hannah.

The reason for Streisand’s refusals was rather simple. “Because there’s a part of me that’s very lazy,” she told Stern. “I work when I work and I’m a total worker, totally concentrated on that project,” the actor continued. “But then when the project’s finished, I am so happy to be not working. Now I just love to be around family and my grandchildren. I haven’t had time for friends in 10 years ’cause I was totally dedicated to this book, except when I had to earn some money.”

Streisand was referring to her recently released memoir, My Name Is Barbra, which details her life and six-decade career. After devoting herself to the expansive (970 pages!) autobiography, Streisand is through with acting in leading roles, she said. “I wouldn’t star in another movie,” she told Stern, because it’s “too much of a pain in the ass to get your hair done, your makeup. But I could direct another movie, and I have one, but it’s, like, my fourth choice of a movie to direct. It’s not the two I wanted to direct.”

As Streisand previously told Vanity Fair, there were several projects she’d dreamed of directing, including a movie about the photographer Margaret Bourke-White, based on a script she’d been developing since 1984, and a big-screen adaptation of Gypsy. “I had the concept, you know? Frame by frame. How the songs should be done,” she said.

All three of Streisand’s previous feature directorial efforts—1983’s Yentl, 1991’s The Prince of Tides, and 1996’s The Mirror Has Two Faces—were Oscar-nominated and led by Streisand, who starred opposite Mandy Patinkin, Nick Nolte, and Jeff Bridges, respectively. But composer Stephen Sondheim, who died in November 2021, wasn’t confident that Streisand could pull double duty on Gypsy, and said she had to choose between starring in the film or directing it. “I said to him, You didn’t like Yentl? He said no, I liked Yentl. I liked Yentl. But this is more difficult a part,” she told VF.

It’s been nearly 30 years since Streisand directed a film. Speaking with Stern, she shared a few other movies that got away, including a project about Catherine the Great and another about the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire; the latter, called Triangle, curiously centered on a “triangle love story.” In the book, Streisand also writes about fighting to adapt Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart long before Ryan Murphy’s version hit HBO in 2014. 

Although she hasn’t been offered the same opportunities as the male filmmakers in her age bracket, including Scorsese and Clint Eastwood, Streisand surmised that she might be too content to sit and putter: “Sometimes I just give up too easily.”