Barbra Streisand Will Likely Never Make Another Movie: ‘It Gets Exhausting’

In My Name Is Barbra, the War & Peace of celebrity memoirs, Barbra Streisand makes it pretty clear that her days making feature films are behind her.

The 81-year-old winner of Oscar, Emmy, Tony and Grammy Awards (and more, more, oh, so much more!) spoke with People now that the best-selling book has been on shelves (and hurting the arms of readers schlepping this thousand-page behemoth on the bus) for nearly a month.

In the conversation, she says more plainly what she implies in the text — that the chances of her making another movie are low. The Funny Girl and What's Up, Doc? star — who has always considered herself an actress first and a singer second — said that another picture feels like too large of a hill to climb, and she is enjoying her time off.

"[I]t was 2009 that I was fighting for the rights to play Gypsy," she says in the interview about the last big push she made as a producer of her own work. "In other words, it gets exhausting trying to come up with the structure of the movie and then have it not happen."

In My Name Is Barbra, she details how a new film version of Gypsy, in which she would star as Mama Rose and also direct, was killed in part by Stephen Sondheim, a longtime collaborator with whom she'd worked for years.

Barbra continued: "If I could have made my movies, I never would’ve written a book. I had such good movies to make, meaning they were about things I cared about, very interesting subjects that … Why did I only make 19 movies in my lifetime? I had many movies that I wanted to make, and then I get lazy. I go, 'Oh yeah, to do this one, I have to have all these fittings for period clothes. This one, I’d have to live in Arkansas to do this one.' I don’t know. It’s complicated, but I am complicated, I guess … I get lazy. Bette Davis made 80 movies. I made 19. She’s a wonderful actress and she liked working. I like time off."

Streisand began producing or co-producing her own work in 1974 with the comedy For Pete's Sake. After essentially shadow-directing A Star Is Born in 1976, she finally directed her first movie, Yentl, in 1984 after trying to get it made for 15 years. She also directed the best picture Oscar-nominated The Prince of Tides and The Mirror Has Two Faces.

Her last three pictures as an actress were light comedies, Meet the Fockers and Little Fockers opposite her old chum Dustin Hoffman, and Anne Fletcher's amusing mother-son flick The Guilt Trip opposite Seth Rogen (about whom Streisand has nothing but nice things to say in her book, but she doesn't exactly dwell on this movie either.)

Here's Barbra crying and calling Robert Redford after they break up in The Way We Were. It's what we, the film lovers, wish we could do with her now that she says she's done.