It used to be whispered backstage that Barbra Streisand was a monster diva, and now British audiences will discover just how demanding the singer can be. The 65-year-old “living legend” is to charge up to £500 a ticket for her first London concerts in 13 years, eclipsing the top prices of the Rolling Stones and Madonna.

There are several theories why Streisand puts such a high premium on herself. One concerns the comic actor Walter Matthau who, cast opposite Streisand in the 1969 movie Hello Dolly!, told her she had “all the talent of a butterfly’s fart”. The rest of her career could be viewed as a determined attempt to prove Matthau wrong. The self-dramatisation involved strikes many as high camp.

Her spokesman is taking the line that the astronomical ticket prices for her concerts at the O2 Arena at the Millennium Dome on July 18 and 22 are justified by “a momentous occasion that ranks with seeing Sinatra or Elvis”. Indeed, to her fans Streisand is the preeminent female singer of the past 40 years, with 71m albums sold in America alone. The classical pianist Glenn Gould described the Streisand voice as “one of the natural wonders of the age”, surpassed only by Elizabeth Schwarzkopf’s.

Not everyone agrees. Even in the 1970s, when Streisand was the top-grossing female film actress with hits such as The Way We Were and A Star is Born, a studio conducted a poll to discover the most popular star. Streisand came top, but a poll was also taken to identify the least popular star. Streisand topped that as well.

Some of this polarisation centres on her prominent nose, which she briefly considered altering by surgery early on. It turned out to be not only the instrument of her unique sound, but an appealing riposte to the bland prettiness of Hollywood actresses in the 1960s. “Is a nose with deviation such a crime against the nation?” she sang in Funny Girl, the musical about Fanny Brice, the Jewish singing sensation. Since then she has worn her proboscis and her Jewishness as badges of honour.

The tension between Streisand the ugly duckling and Streisand the captivating siren was best summed up by the actor Omar Sharif who, finding himself cast with her in Funny Girl, demanded: “How can she be a leading lady? She’s not beautiful enough.” At rehearsals he began to concede that she didn’t look too bad from certain angles. By the end of the week he was convinced she was “the most gorgeous girl I’d ever seen in my life. I was madly in love with her”.

But then the Egyptian film star might have noticed a nobility about Streisand that came to light recently – her resemblance to the Egyptian queen Cleopatra on a rather unflattering Roman coin. It was vindication of the film director John Huston’s claim that Streisand would have made a much better Cleopatra than Elizabeth Taylor in Joseph L Mankiewicz’s epic movie.

She is certainly as rich as the Egyptian queen. Her 20-concert tour in America last year broke records by grossing $92.5m. It was only the fourth tour in her career. The poor girl has to rake it in while she can.

What on earth does she spend it all on? Some of the proceeds of her imminent European tour, beginning in Vienna on June 21, are earmarked for the Barbra Streisand Foundation, which supports causes such as the environment, civil rights and disadvantaged youngsters. Then there’s her political activism. A fervent Democrat whose attacks on President George W Bush over Iraq earned her strong criticism, she has helped to stump up money for both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the party’s two leading presidential contenders.

Her support for Hillary does not quite match the recent “revelation” of President Bill Clinton’s obsession with the singer This is set out in an unauthorised biography of Streisand, in which Christopher Andersen claims that Clinton was infatuated with her - he says she spent a night at the White House while Hillary was away tending to her dying father. When the president appeared later with scratch marks on his neck and face, some saw the hand of Hillary. After Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, Streisand was quoted as saying: “I don’t care who he’s screwed as long as he doesn’t screw the country.”

Andersen also claimed that the Prince of Wales fell under her spell at a gala dinner in November 1994 and within days had cleared their diaries for a “tea-date” at his Los Angeles hotel and later met at Highgrove. A staff member alleged Prince Charles and Streisand were “affectionate towards one another” and were “quite flustered” when he entered a room unexpectedly. Streisand dismissed the account.

Her conquests are said to have included the Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau, the actors Ryan O’Neal (her co-star in What’s Up Doc?), Kris Kristofferson (ditto A Star is Born), Warren Beatty, Richard Gere, Jon Voight, Elvis Presley (who painted her toenails) and Jon Peters, a hairdresser turned film producer. The tennis star Andre Agassi admitted to shaving his chest hair for Streisand – he went bald later.

“Why can’t I find a man like Robert Redford?” she sighed to a friend on the set of The Way We Were. The closest she came to bagging her co-star was on screen during an seminude scene. According to Harry Stradling, the film’s cinematographer, the chemistry between them was “very arousing . . . more so than just actors acting”. But for once, it seems, Streisand’s passion was not consummated.

She now lives in wedded bliss with James Brolin, the 66-year-old actor best known for the television series Marcus Welby, MD, and Hotel, who declared “I’m taking you home” three hours after meeting Streisand. When they tied the knot in 1998 at her Malibu home it was her second marriage and his third. He has introduced her to the “joys” of motels and driving around in a pickup truck. “Now I know what it’s like to have a father,” she has said.

Her own father Emanuel, a high school teacher, died in 1943 when she was 15 months old. Emanuel’s father, a tailor called Isaac, had emigrated in 1898 from the village of Brezany, Galicia, on the Austrian side of the Hungarian border, to New York’s Lower East Side ghetto where he set up a fish stall.

Streisand’s dead father and Jewish heritage came together in her 1983 film Yentl, in which she was star, director, co-producer and co-writer. Although critically acclaimed, it won her no personal Oscar nomination - testimony to her unpopularity in Hollywood, it was said. However, she did win Oscars for best actress (Funny Girl) and best original song (Evergreen, from A Star is Born), as well as multiple Emmy, Grammy and Golden Globe awards.

Brought up in Brooklyn by her distant and unaffectionate mother Diana Ida Rosen, a school secretary, Streisand had a turbulent relationship with her stepfather Louis Kind, who loathed her. She was a skinny ugly child with crossed eyes and a huge nose who suffered from asthma and panic attacks. She was raised “frightened of everything” and when she demanded love from her mother “she gave me food”. Diana told her she had too weak a voice to become a singer and was not pretty enough to act.

Intent on becoming an actress, she attended theatre workshops in New York but her unique singing voice took precedence. Despite never having received a singing lesson, at 18 she won a talent competition in a gay bar in Greenwich Village. According to James Spada, one of her biographers, the audience thought it was a joke: “They looked at this gawky girl with a large nose and crooked teeth and eyes that seemed to watch each other and they didn’t know whether to laugh or groan.” Then she began to sing and they were spellbound.

Regular bookings followed at a fashionable New York nightclub and within two years she was starring in a Broadway show with Elliott Gould. They were married the following year. At 21 she was on the cover of Time magazine and winning ovations in the stage version of Funny Girl every night. After eight years of marriage, Gould’s career was going badly and by some accounts she dumped him. When their only child, Jason, outed himself as gay in a 1997 film, Streisand declined to attend the premiere despite being a gay icon and an advocate of gay rights.

Streisand’s career has been one of peaks and troughs. After an eight-year absence, in 2004 she returned to the screen for the highly successful comedy Meet the Fockers, the sequel to Meet the Parents.

For her London concerts she may have greater need than ever of the 120 bath towels she demanded on her recent US tour. The media are already raining on her parade over the eyewatering ticket prices. Pop stars are meant to belong to the people, not price themselves as high culture. And there is something about the London venue she may not have have factored in - the curse of the Millennium Dome.

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