Barbra Streisand remembers the moment she became 'aware of what was beautiful about my face'

Barbra Streisand has seen it all in her decades-long career, but one particular moment stands out.

When reflecting on her life in an interview with The Guardian, the multi-hyphenate megastar, 80, said it was illustrator and artist Bob Schulenberg's drawings that "made me aware of what was beautiful about my face, which I wasn't aware of at all."

That awareness, she explained, happened in tandem with her meteoric rise to fame in the late 1960s, after her historic two-year engagement at the Bon Soir, a tiny club in New York City's Greenwich Village neighborhood. A remastered recording of one of her performances at the club nearly 60 years later, Live at the Bon Soir, is set to release in early November.

It was during this time that major hitters in the industry took notice of Streisand's talent and beauty and confidence — including Diana Vreeland, the famed fashion editor who led Vogue magazine from 1963 to 1971.

Vreeland put Streisand on the March 1966 cover of Vogue, with an editorial spread that focused on her prominent nose. The singer remembers it being a watershed moment for the self-image of many women.

"I was thrilled about that!" she said of the cover. Still, it didn't come without its critics.

"I was called embarrassing names," she remembers of that time. One critic even compared her side profile to an anteater's. "Another critic said I looked like the Egyptian queen Nefertiti. I thought, really? Maybe I'm both!"

The star certainly has had the last laugh, becoming one of the most successful singers of the 20th century.

Over the years, she's poked fun of some of the old criticism she endured as a young artist. During an interview on The Tonight Show last year, she revealed some of the ways people tried to change her into something else when she first started out in music — including giving her a different stage name.

“People wanted me to be called Barbra Sands,” she told Jimmy Fallon at the time. “I thought, ‘What? No.’ Streisand is my name. I don't want to change it.”

The singer added that, at the time, she was also fielding other unsolicited suggestions.

“For my first record they wanted me to call it ‘Sweet and Saucy Streisand,’” she said. “I am neither too sweet or too saucy.”

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