The Lists: In Contention's Top 10 Oscar-Winning Biopic Performances
Who do the Oscar hopefuls from this year's prestige biopics need to measure up to?
5. Barbra Streisand as Fanny Brice in "Funny Girl" (1968)
Not so much an individual performance as a career mission statement, Streisand’s broad, peculiar, goofy, graceful one-woman show as early 20th-century vaudeville queen Fanny Brice has been broken down into iconic individual lines and numbers to such an extent that people tend to forget the sharp character throughline she maintains amid the dazzle, and how specifically the performance reflects an entire bygone era of theater. It’s scarcely believable that this is a screen debut, and not only because the star had conquered the role on Broadway first.
Photo Credit: Columbia Pictures