Barbra Streisand’s appearance at the Oscars had been widely rumored, but it still created a spark of excitement. She has mostly retired from live performances since her 2017 tour “The Music… The Mem’ries… The Magic!”, only performing a few shows in 2019, and she has admitted that singing live makes her nervous.
Talking about “The Way We Were”, Streisand said, “After reading the first script, I could only imagine one man in the role: Robert Redford. At first, he turned it down because he felt the character had no backbone, and he was right. After several drafts, he finally agreed. He was a brilliant actor, and we had a wonderful time playing off each other because we never knew what the other would do. The film is now a classic love story, but it’s also about a dark time in history, the late ’40s and early ’50s, when people were informing on each other and forced to take loyalty oaths.”
She continued, “Bob had real backbone on and off the screen. He spoke up for press freedom, the environment, and supported new voices through the Sundance Institute — some of whom are up for Oscars tonight. I called him an intellectual cowboy who blazed his own trail. He won an Academy Award for best director, and I miss him so much, even though he loved teasing me. He’d call me Babs, and I’d laugh at him, saying, ‘Do I look like a Babs?’ The way he said it made me smile.”
Streisand also shared a personal memory: “Years later, we were chatting on the phone about politics and art. As we were hanging up, he said, ‘Babs, I love you dearly and I always will.’ In my last note to him, I wrote back, ‘I love you too,’ and signed it ‘Babs.’”
She had performed “The Way We Were” at the Oscars before, in 2013, to honor composer Marvin Hamlisch. Redford passed away in September at age 89, and Streisand remembered him in an Instagram post: “Every day on the set of The Way We Were was exciting, intense, and pure joy. We were such opposites — he loved horses; I was allergic! But we kept trying to understand each other, just like our characters. Bob was charismatic, intelligent, intense, and one of the finest actors ever.”
She added, “The last time I saw him, we discussed art and shared our first drawings. He was one of a kind, and I’m grateful to have worked with him.”
The song “The Way We Were” won the Oscar for Best Original Song in 1974, and Hamlisch also won Best Original Score. Streisand was nominated for Best Actress, and the film had six total nominations. The song also won the 1975 Grammy for Song of the Year, was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2008, topped the Billboard Hot 100 for three weeks, and became the title track of a Streisand album.
