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Barbra Streisand has opened up about her 27-year absence from the stage, confessing she shied away from the concert spotlight after becoming the target of a cultural backlash following her interracial kiss with Egyptian actor Omar Sharif in Funny Girl.

The Evergreen hitmaker famously forgot the lyrics to a number of songs during her big show in New York’s Central Park in 1966, prompting her to take an extended hiatus from live public performances until announcing plans for her comeback in 1994. She has now blamed the embarrassing show mishap on the pressures of international fame and her concerns for her own safety after the fall-out from the release of a publicity photo for Funny Girl, which featured the Jewish star locking lips with Sharif as tensions heightened between Israel and its neighbouring Islamic states in the lead up to 1967’s Six-Day War.

Her fears were compounded by the fact that New York Police Department bosses had to pull the majority of cops serving as security at the gig at the last minute due to a state visit by Soviet Union politician Alexei Kosygin.

She explains, “I was doing a concert in Central Park in front of a 150,000 people sitting on the grass. I was making Funny Girl at the time, and it was during a war, and Omar Sharif’s movies were banned because he was kissing me. “So I was scared… Then we were supposed to have 300 guys (police officers at the concert) and some big Russian guy… Kosygin, I think, came to town and they took 270 cops away, so we had 30 cops and it was scary, put it that way. “So I forgot words to three of my songs and I wasn’t cute about it, I was not charming. I totally spaced out… It’s show business. Aren’t you supposed to be cute and hum? Nothing… And so I didn’t sing again for 27 years.”