Barbra Streisand has always been a trailblazer: as a singer, an actress, and a filmmaker. So it’s not surprising she also became the first female filmmaker to win the Golden Globe for Best Director, for the musical Yentl in 1984.
With a frizzy ’80s perm, elegant black sequined top and matching choker, a genuinely shocked Streisand used her Globes acceptance speech to support other women too. “I hope this award offers new opportunities for so many talented women to try and make their dreams become realities, as I did,” she told the packed Beverly Hilton ballroom with her gold statue in her hand. “Directing for me called on everything you’ve ever seen or felt or heard, and it was really the highlight of my professional life.”

It was just one of many career milestones Streisand has ticked off, as one of only a handful of women to win Oscars, Grammys, Emmys, and Golden Globes.
In the late 1960s and ’70s, she was the No. 1 female box office draw, with films including Funny Girl (1968), What’s Up, Doc? (1972), and The Way We Were (1973).
In 1969, Streisand co-founded the production company First Artists with Sidney Poitier and Paul Newman, with each performer pledging to make at least three films under their banner, taking lower salaries in exchange for more creative control and a percentage of profits. Streisand’s three films were Up the Sandbox (1972), A Star is Born (1976), and The Main Event (1979).

It was 1968 when she came across the short story “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy,” but Streisand had to wait 15 years to eventually convince a studio to let her make her feature directorial and screenwriting debut (the latter as co-writer). She also produced and starred in the musical, as a woman who pretends to be a man in order to study the Talmud.
“The first four words in the short story are, ‘After her father’s death.’ My father died when I was 15 months old, and I’d always felt different from all the other little girls on the block because I was a girl with no father,” Streisand told the Hollywood Foreign Press Association during a November 1983 press conference. “My father was a teacher and a scholar, just like Yentl’s father, so I was very drawn to the story. It’s about the pursuit of a dream, a girl fighting against the odds, and the male and female in all of us, which has always been fascinating to me too.”
Streisand went on to direct two more films, The Prince of Tides (1991) and The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996), but it took 37 years for her victory to be matched by another woman.
In 2010 and 2013, one female director, Kathryn Bigelow, was nominated for The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. In 2021, three female filmmakers were nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Director: Emerald Fennell (Promising Young Woman), Regina King (One Night in Miami…) and Chloé Zhao (Nomadland).
When Zhao became the second woman ever to win in that category, we’re betting Streisand cheered louder than anyone.