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Barbra Streisand is speaking out on a previous co-star of hers, and his rather shocking behind-the-scenes behavior.
In her new memoir My Name Is Barbra, the award-winning triple threat discusses Yentl, the 1983 film that marked her directorial debut, per People. Streisand starred as the film’s namesake — an Ashkenazi Jewish girl who dresses up as a man in order to get a religious education — alongside Mandy Patinkin‘s Avigdor.
Describing Patinkin as the only person on set who “disturbed [her] equilibrium,” Streisand recalls him telling her he “‘thought [they] were going to have a more personal relationship’” in her dressing room, soon after production had started, per an excerpt published by People.
“‘What?’ I had no idea what he was talking about,” she pens, noting that he told her, “‘I thought we were going to have an affair.’”
According to Vulture, Patinkin had been married to Kathryn Grody at the time, and the two are still together today.
“I looked at him as if he were crazy . . . 1) I would never have an affair with an actor I was directing, 2) he was married, and 3) I wasn’t at all attracted to him,” Streisand writes. “But I couldn’t tell him he was not exactly fascinating to me. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, so I simply said, ‘I don’t operate that way.’ Tears rolled down his cheeks.”
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She told him she would replace him if he didn’t get his act together, and recalls mentoring him with respect to particular scenes, adding, “[he] was probably irritated.”
“He must have felt as if I were putting him in a straitjacket,” she explains in her book. “I realize now, in retrospect, that he wasn’t used to being a leading man. And I was trying to make him into one.”
After the actor had been “making [her] life miserable for months,” she decided to remove a scene between herself and Patinkin in which they would spend the night together. She writes that she “just couldn’t bear the thought of making love with him.”
“I’m not that good an actress,” she quips in the book. “So I changed it. I rewrote the scene. And now that I look back on it, I wonder if I allowed my frustration with Mandy to overrule my instincts. Maybe I should have let Yentl . . . and the audience . . . have that moment.
Yentl is streaming on Max. My Name is Barbra is out now.
