Barbra Streisand brought the Oscars audience to its feet at the end of her eulogy for Robert Redford with a line from the theme song from the 1973 romantic drama The Way We Were, in which the two co-starred.
Streisand’s 40-second musical performance followed a three-and-a-half minute oral homage. There, singer-actor-director Streisand spoke about the resonance of the films he starred in in today’s social relevance, as well as Redford’s “backbone on and off screen.”
Streisand’s TV appearance had been highly rumored, but the development still came as a shock considering she had effectively retired from live performance after completing “The Music…The Memories…The Magic!” in 2019 and performing a few shows. She toured in 2017 and has been open about how singing live has influenced “Willy’s” for her.
“After I read the first script for ‘The Way We Were,’ I could only imagine one man to play the role, and that was Robert Redford,” Streisand began. “But he turned it down because there was no backbone to the character. He didn’t have any standing, and he was right. After many drafts, Bob finally agreed to do it. He was a wonderful, sensitive actor. He never knew what the other person was going to do in the scene, and he was right. We had a great time fooling around with each other, and I’m excited that while “The Way We Were” is now considered a classic love story, it’s also a story about a dark time in our history when people exchanged information with each other and imposed oaths of allegiance.” Late 40’s to early 50’s.
“Now, Bob had a real backbone on and off screen. He championed free press, he protected the environment, he encouraged new voices at the Sundance Institute, some of whom are Oscar nominees tonight. That’s so great. He’s thoughtful. I used to call him an intelligent cowboy who carved out his own path and won an Academy Award for Best Director. He loved to tease me, but now I miss him more than ever. He called me Babs, and I used to do the same.” Say, “Bob, do I look like Bub? I’m not Bub.” But the way he said it made me laugh.
“And years later, we were chatting on the phone about all the usual things: politics, art, favorite things, and when we hung up, he said, ‘Baby, I love you with all my heart, and always will.’ And the last letter I wrote to Bob ended with, ‘I love you, too, and I signed it ‘Babs.’
There is precedent for Streisand reviving “The Way We Were” at the Oscars. She revived the song in honor of composer Marvin Hamlisch in a 2013 television memorial segment.
Mr. Redford died in September at the age of 89. At the time, Streisand remembered him in an Instagram post. “Every day on the set of ‘The Way We Were’ was exciting, intense and pure joy,” she wrote. “We were complete opposites. He came from the horse world and I was allergic to horses. Yes, like the characters in the movie, we kept trying to get to know each other better. Bob was charismatic, intelligent, passionate, always funny, and one of the greatest actors of all time.”
“The last time I met him, when he came to lunch, we talked about art and decided to send each other our first drawings. He was one of a kind, and I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity to work with him.”
At the 46th Academy Awards in 1974, Hamlisch and co-writers Alan Bergman and Marilyn Bergman won the award for Best Original Song for the song “The Way We Were.” Hamlisch also won Best Original Score, the only other Oscar nod the film received, but Streisand was nominated for Best Actress out of six total nominations. “The Way We Were” also won the Grammy Award for Song of the Year in 1975 and was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2008. The song served as the title track for Streisand’s solo album and spent three weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100 upon its original release.
