During the lead-up to the revelatory song “I’m the Greatest Star,” in the 1968 film Funny Girl, Fanny Brice tries to explain her uniqueness. “I’m a bagel on a plate of onion rolls.”

For the then 25-year-old Barbra Streisand, who was inhabiting the role of Brice, that assessment could just have easily applied to her place in the Hollywood creative structure. She was different. She highlighted her ethnicity. She refused to change her name or looks. She dared to push boundaries. She broke the rules. Streisand’s exceptional talent challenged the social structure of women in Hollywood, eventually bringing her to the pinnacle of creative achievement as she became the first woman to write, direct, produce and star in a major motion picture.

But, even with an accumulation of 11 Golden Globes, two Academy Awards, 10 Grammys, five Emmys, and one very special Tony Award in 1970 for Star of the Decade over her legendary sixty-year career, Streisand faced constant resistance to asserting control.

“When I was in I Can Get it for you Wholesale,’ she recalled during one of her HFPA press conferences, “the first day I ever came to audition I said to them: ‘Iʼd like to sing this song’ (Miss Marmelstein) sitting down, for two reasons. One, I’m nervous and two I just thought it would be an interesting concept for the song because I’m a secretary, to sing it in a secretary’s chair and roll around the stage. So, in a sense I was directing, you know, my first audition. Then, for a long time, they tried to talk me out of it.” She elaborates that, during rehearsals, the creative powers forced her to try to perform the song in several other ways that never registered. Until, during the Philadelphia preview, they let the then 18-year-old test out her whim. “It stopped the show. You know I felt terrible, in a way. I felt very guilty. But I believed in that way.”

It was her creative instinct that proved right. Streisand highlighted that pursuit in her interpretation of Stephen Sondheim’s ‘Putting it Together’, in the 1985 award-winning The Broadway Album, when she sang, “Art isn’t easy. Every minor detail is a major decision. Have to keep things in scale. Have to hold to your vision.” While her pursuit of that vision agitated the male power structure around her, the Brooklyn-born icon refused to be deterred.

From the early days of Hollywood, women have played a vital role in filmed entertainment. Frances Marion was the industry’s highest-paid screenwriter from 1912 to the 1940s. Mary Pickford, who by age 24 was the highest-paid actor in Hollywood, helped establish United Artists. The creative community had Dorothy Arzner, the first woman to ever direct a sound film following the silent era. And there was Lucille Ball, the first woman to ever run a major television studio-like Streisand herself, Ball ultimately received the Cecil B. deMille Award at the Golden Globes.

Though each of these trailblazers faced a gender barrier, they had the savvy and smarts to navigate around it. For Streisand, that steering would prove the greatest when she decided to make Yentl. Even though she was one of the most bankable movie stars in the world, most studios turned her down. Some of her contemporaries – like Golden Globe Winning Directors Robert Redford, Warren Beatty, and Clint Eastwood – were allowed to act in films they chose to direct.

“I do think that somehow in Hollywood, you know that the idea of a woman being financially responsible is maybe a little frightening to them,” she noted to the HFPA. “Or: how could a woman also direct and act? How could she handle it? Directing is known as a more masculine trade, for some reason. I don’t know. Cameras, lenses, tracks, locations, playbacks, or having to deal with so many, many people. I think it’s a combination of all those things. The idea of being a female movie star directing is probably more frightening than a Lina Wertmuller, you know, an older woman who just is a director. Something just doesn’t go together. I think it was scary for them.”

Yentl went on to receive five Academy Award nominations, winning for Best Original Song Score. Streisand was ignored for her work as a director, even though Steven Spielberg hailed that same work as the best directorial debut since Citizen Kane. The Golden Globes did recognize the film. Yentl received the award for Best Film, Musical or Comedy. The Best Director award went to Streisand, the first woman to receive that honor.

For Streisand, the main reward is always the work, as she so eloquently put it during one of her HFPA interviews. “I’m not a student of film. So, I never, you know, I couldn’t tell you what John Ford did as compared to Howard Hawks, or whatever. I believe in being true to yourself. I believe that when you contact your deepest feeling about something, the simplest truth, you know, the essence of a moment, the essence of a scene, then that tells you, that directs you how it should be shot. When I sing a song, I do the same thing. It’s coming from the deepest part of me, you know. That deepest part of me, I think, tells me what to do.”

Years later, in a speech to Women in Film, Streisand summed up the gender imbalance in Hollywood. “If he acts, produces, and directs, he’s called multi-talented. If she does the same thing, she’s called vain and egotistical.” She continued to question the establishment, saying “It’s been said that a man’s reach should exceed his grasp. Why can’t that be true for a woman?”

“All this to say that, clearly, men and women are measured by a different yardstick. That makes me angry. Of course, I’m not supposed to be angry. A woman should be soft-spoken, agreeable, ladylike, understated. In other words, stifled … Come to think of it, a lot of things make me angry.” All in all, irritation never signaled defeat. In fact, it motivated her. Unlike many of the men she had to push past, Streisand continues to make her mark, blazing trails both artistically and philanthropically (establishing the Women’s Heart Health Program at UCLA). Maybe it’s time to borrow another Sondheim lyric in which she so triumphantly proclaimed, “Good times and bum times, I’ve seen them all and, my dear, I’m still here!”