Funny Girl (film) What infuriated me was the way they did things—never telling me, never talking to me, just cutting. I think they were afraid that if they were nice to me, Barbra would have been upset." In her book "Talking Back: Images of Jewish Women in American Popular Culture", Joyce Antler writes that Streisand has created several rich images of a Jewish woman within film, "Funny Girl" being one of them. In "Funny Girl", Antler writes, Streisand is able to portray a character that is obviously Jewish, and in this role she creates a space for the intelligent Jewish woman to be
The Great Ziegfeld of the performers of the earlier Broadway version of the Ziegfeld Follies were cast in the film as themselves, including Fanny Brice and Harriet Hoctor, the ballet dancer and contortionist. "The Great Ziegfeld" marked Rainer's second Hollywood film role after "Escapade" (also with Powell). Fanny Brice appears as a comedian in the abridged song sequence "My Man" and played an effective version of herself in addition to her routine comic role as the funny girl. Nat Pendleton, a freestyle wrestler who had won the silver medal at the 1920 Summer Olympics in Antwerp and had appeared alongside Powell in "The