Barbra Remembers Arthur Laurents

Barbra Streisand says she'll miss working with sometime collaborator Arthur Laurents, who passed away yesterday at 93.

Streisand released the following statement today: "Arthur and I go way back to I Can Get It For You Wholesale in 1962. Then we did The Way We Were in 1973 and we were about to do Gypsy together. He created people you care about because he cared about people. I spoke to him a few weeks ago and he sounded so strong, as always. He was lucky to have lived a full and creative life up til the very end. I’ll miss working with him again."

Laurents directed I Can Get It For You Wholesale, which helped launch Streisand's career with the showstopping number "Miss Marmelstein" and garnered the young performer a Tony award nomination. Laurents recalls her audition in his memoir Original Story By:

"True, with her bird's nest of scraggly hair and her gawky, disorganized body, she was a poster girl for Spinster Incarnate. Equally true was the debit side: thrift shop clothes which proclaimed eccentricity, behavior which was calculated spontaneity ... When she sang, she was simple; when she sang, she was vulnerable; when she sang, she was moving, funny, mesmerizing, anything she wanted to be. The authors were beaming, the producer wasn't thrilled but if Barbra Streisand's agent could have read my mind, he would have asked a fortune for her to play Miss Marmelstein."