Barbra Streisand received this year’s Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award, which was presented to her at this year’s ceremony by Jennifer Aniston and Bradley Cooper (sorry, Lea Michele), who sung the icon’s praises as an actress, singer, producer, and director. Per usual, the awards show played a retrospective montage of Streisand’s decades-long career, featuring classics like Funny Girl and Yentl, but thankfully didn’t forget about the equally important Meet the Fockers or The Guilt Trip. After that trip down memory lane made the audience (Anne Hathaway, specifically) misty-eyed, Streisand fittingly took the stage to “Memory.”
“Sometimes I don’t trust the teleprompter,” she began her speech, holding up her backup note cards, before saying that she much prefers awards like this, where she knows in advance that she’s going to win. “You don’t have to sit there and squirm … and if you don’t get it, you have to put on such a happy face, so happy to lose,” she said. “I remember dreaming of being an actress as a teenager, sitting in my bed in Brooklyn with a pint of coffee ice cream,” she said, recalling a trip to the Astor Theatre where she caught a screening of Guys and Dolls. “Oh my God, everything was so beautiful up on that screen. The colors, the sets … and then I saw the most beautiful actor, Marlon Brando,” she said, adding that she realized she wanted to be the one whom he was falling in love with on the screen. “That make-believe world was much more pleasant than anything I was experiencing. I didn’t like reality, I wanted to be in the movies … somehow, someway, it all came true.”
Streisand concluded her speech about the power of finding truth in filmmaking, by thanking the Screen Actors Guild as well as the audience. “I’ve loved working with you, playing with you, and inhabiting that magical world of the movies with you,” she said. “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.” No Babs, thank you.
