Barbra Streisand will add the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Chaplin Award to her roster of honors, in recognition of her achievement as a director, writer, producer and film star, the group said on Friday.
Streisand, who shot to fame in the 1960s on Broadway and as a major recording star, will receive the honor at the 40th Annual Chaplin Award gala in New York on April 22 which will feature celebrity guests and a host of film and interview clips.
“The Board is very excited to have Barbra Streisand as the next recipient of The Chaplin Award,” Ann Tenenbaum, The Film Society of Lincoln Center’s board chairman, said in a news release.
“She is an artist whose long career of incomparable achievements is most powerfully expressed by the fact that her acclaimed ‘Yentl’ was such a milestone film.”
The group cited Streisand as the first American woman artist to receive credit as writer, director, producer and star of a major feature film.
It also noted she is the only artist to receive an Academy Award, Tony, Emmy, Grammy, Directors Guild of America award, Golden Globe, National Medal of Arts and Peabody Awards, France’s Legion d’honneur and the American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award. She was also the first female film director to receive a Kennedy Center honor.
“We welcome her to the list of masterful directors who have been prior recipients of the Chaplin Award Tribute,” added Tenenbaum, referring to luminaries such as Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder and Martin Scorsese.
Stars ranging from Bette Davis and Elizabeth Taylor to last year’s recipient, Catherine Deneuve, have received the award, which was renamed for its first recipient Charles Chaplin, who returned to the United States from exile to accept the commendation in 1972.
Streisand, 70, starred in such hits as “The Way We Were” and “Funny Girl,” for which she won an Oscar, and went on to direct films including “The Prince of Tides” and “The Mirror Has Two Faces.”
More recently she has returned to screen acting, in “Meet the Fockers” with Dustin Hoffman, Ben Stiller and Robert De Niro, and “The Guilt Trip,” a Christmas 2012 release co-starring Seth Rogen.
Reuters
