Still a funny girl

If anyone has earned a respite from the public gaze and a life of comfy semiretirement, it is 62-year-old Barbra Streisand. In a career that spans five decades and encompasses triumphant turns as singer, actress, producer, writer and director, there are few worlds in the showbiz universe that she has failed to conquer. Gracing the groaning shelves of her trophy cabinet you'll find two Oscars, four Emmys, eight Golden Globes, three People's Choice awards, two Women In Film Crystal awards, two ASCAP Film And Television Music awards, a Cecil B. DeMille award and a Lifetime Achievement award from the American Film Institute.

She was the first person ever to win an Oscar, an Emmy, a Grammy and a Tony. If they handed out a gong for the most adored and revered star of her era, it would no doubt occupy pride of place. Countless best-selling albums, rapturously received concert tours and a slew of films including Funny Girl (her 1968 debut), Hello, Dolly!, The Way We Were, A Star Is Born, Yentl and The Prince Of Tides have earned her a legion of incomparably devoted fans.

Along the way, however, she has also garnered a reputation as a ferocious diva, an impetuous goddess who guards her image like a lioness and who, especially now, ensconced in her palatial Malibu mansion among lapdogs and prize-winning roses, rarely deigns to walk among the hoi polloi.

At least, so the legend goes. It's a legend that she gives the lie to this month with her appearance in Meet The Fockers, the eagerly awaited follow-up to 2000's smash hit comedy Meet The Parents, in which she plays Roz, Ben Stiller's loopy mom, a frazzle-haired, middle-aged hippie who is partial to a spot of lunchtime slap-and-tickle and conducts sex therapy sessions for local geriatrics. Favouring flouncey floral get-ups, dangly ethnic jewellery and mortifying displays of public affection, she is amazing to behold. 'I thought Roz was kind of stuck in a Seventies time warp,' she explains, 'so I guess I instinctively tried to dress like that.

After the movie was done, I was looking at the poster and I thought, She looks so familiar to me, who is that? Then I realised - that's me in A Star Is Born.'

More amazing still, given that her co-stars include Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman (who plays her insatiably touchy-feely husband Bernie), is that Streisand completely steals the show, throwing herself into the rambunctious role of Roz Focker with infectious gusto and keeping the laughs coming even when the soso script falters. It's a wonderful performance, reminding us not only that she is a fine comic actress, but also that she is not the majestic, untouchable icon we have been lead to believe.

'A lot of people are intimidated by me,' she admits. 'But Jay [Roach, director] wasn't at all, he was so collaborative and open to ideas. And I loved that people wanted me to be in this movie. I was nervous, it's been a long time [her last film was 1996's The Mirror Has Two Faces]. But I really wanted to see what it was like again - the roar of the greasepaint, the smell of the crowd.'

Today, at the Beverly Hills Four Seasons, there is not much of Roz Focker in Streisand's tailored beige suit or immaculately bobbed hair. And yet the character does seem to have inhabited her. She is relaxed, eager to talk and unfailingly good-humoured, regularly breaking into shrieks of bawdy laughter whenever the fruitier aspects of her character crop up.

'I had to watch tapes of sex therapists,' she says, 'and they're very funny because it's all so matter-of-fact, so practical. Sexuality is very interesting. What is so lovely about [Roz and Bernie] is that later in life it's wonderful to have a relationship and keep it hot, keep it sexual, to never let that die because it is a life force. And it's fun! Sex definitely gets better with age. You're less inhibited, freer to enjoy the experience. As you get older you have a sense of your own mortality and it's like living your life to the fullest, experiencing your body.'

Strangely, on the other key element of the Roz Focker character - motherhood --Streisand is more cagey. 'How do you bring your own parental skills to something like this? I would say it's impossible to give a child too much love. But as an actor I don't sit and think about my life and how it affects the roles I play. So much of it is instinctive and visceral. You bring what you know and what you observe in other people to the character.'