Once again Streisand is playing with her personal and professional image, her non-Hollywood appearance and volatile love life. There's still a lot of the Brooklyn ugly duckling, of insecurities, in the woman who is the only person to have won multiple Oscar, Emmy, Grammy, Peabody and Cable Ace awards. In the film she and her mother played by Lauren Bacall have a difficult relationship. For Bacall's character external beauty is the only currency. In real life Streisand experience something similar: ‘I didn't grow up in a supportive childhood. I had no one telling me I was terrific or could do anything I wanted. I wanted to be an actress but my mother did everything she could to discourage me. She kept telling me I wasn't pretty enough, that I was too skinny, too intense, too different. ‘My mother was and is a pretty woman, conventionally pretty, tiny little nose, everything symmetrical. Some of the things that are said in the movie came out of my mother's mouth. ‘In the last few years my mother and I have been able to come to terms with a lot of our lives and say the words ‘' I love you'' that I never heard as a child. She never paid me a compliment. She said she didn't want me to get a swelled head .My mother now has a touch of Alzheimer's which is very sad for me but at least she feels calmer and more peaceful in her life in some way.' If there is a message in her movie it is that anything can be redefined through love. Even looks. ‘I love beautiful things -- scenery, sculpture, paintings by great artists like Michelangelo. There is something to be said for superficial beauty and, yet, what is beauty? I don't presume to have all the answers. ‘Is beauty in the eye of the beholder or is it in the heart of the beholder? ‘What does love look like? What attracts us to somebody? Is it lust? Is it physical. Is it DNA? Something to do with our own parents? The first love, the mother or the father? Rubens painted voluptuous women with big stomachs. Is it them? Is it Kate Moss? ‘It's unfortunate because we see all these wonderful skinny little models who seem to get younger every year and we see the beauty of Rubens. Is it youth and innocence? It's all questions. ‘You might be attracted to someone who is externally beautiful. But if they are not beautiful in spirit, if they are not generous of spirit -- if they don't have character, if they don't have soul -- the beauty is going to fade quickly.' Her own relationship with the wealthy, established television actor James Brolin (‘Marcus Welby M.D.', ‘Hotel') she says is flourishing. There has been talk of marriage but she says there is not date set. It is clearly a serious business: her eyes work like acrobats when she talks of him. And their version of ‘Blind Date'. |
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