She is one of the world’s greatest performers, with so many accolades to her name she makes Beyonce look like a beginner.

And after six decades of global success and adulation, you might expect Barbra Streisand to be more than a little confident in her own abilities.

But ahead of her first UK show for six years, the superstar singer claims that, on the contrary, she does not like the sound of her own voice and is constantly wracked by self-doubt.

At the age of 77 and said to be worth £640million, Streisand still suffers stage fright, gets upset by critics and often agrees with her rare negative reviews.

Tomorrow she steps on to the stage for the British Summer Time festival in London’s Hyde Park, in front of 50,000 people.

But while the long-awaited show will delight her army of fans over here, the Woman in Love star admits she does not enjoy exercising her vocal chords, and will not sing if she is not on stage or in the recording studio.

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She says: “I never sing unless I have to. I don’t sing around the house. Singing is like work to me, it’s professional. It’s something I do. It’s not cathartic – it’s the opposite. I don’t go around singing.

“If I sang happy birthday at a birthday party I would sound lousy.”

However, she is in her element in the studio. She says: “I love recording, putting on the headphones and singing to the music I love. I love to sing in the studio, as you don’t have worry about how you look. It’s all about the music.”

She is regarded as one of the greatest vocalists in music and, given her record, could well claim to be the best ever.

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Streisand is one of the few EGOTs – entertainers who have won an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony Award.

She has also won nine Golden Globes, and holds the Billboard chart record as the female with most number-one albums. She is also the only recording artist to have had a number-one album in each of the last six decades.

The star of Funny Girl, A Star Is Born, Yentl – and yes, Meet The Fockers – admits her insecurity is hard to reconcile with her phenomenal success, and has even sought help to figure it out.

She says: “I’m a paradox, I think. I’m very vulnerable and I also have a sense of who I am, and this teacher said to me that’s good.

"You need the vulnerability to balance the part of me that’s secure. Every once in a while I get insecure, and think, ‘Do you think you can do that?’ You have to have self doubt. It’s what motivates you.”

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One place where she is secure, with no self doubt, is her marriage to actor James Brolin, 78, probably best known these days as the dad of Avengers: Endgame star Josh Brolin. This week they celebrated 21 years of marriage.

She has son Jason Gould, 52, with first husband Elliott Gould, 80, star of films like Oceans Eleven and MASH.

She once dated tennis star Andre Agassi, 28 years her junior. Brolin, who she wed in 1998, has accompanied her to the UK and has been talking about her controversial decision to clone dead dog, Samantha.

The 14-year-old Coton de Tulear died in 2017 and Brolin says it left his wife in pieces. He said: “I had never seen her so devastated.”

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Streisand paid up to £80,000 for the cloning by a South Korean company, and got more than she bargained for.

“We waited for the puppy,” said Brolin. “But we got a call one day to say our four puppies were just born.”

One sadly died, they gave another away, and now they are left with “twins” Scarlet and Violet.

Perhaps this kind of thing is why Streisand thinks her husband sees her as someone who never really grew up.

She puts it down to growing up without a dad in Brooklyn, New York.

She was just a baby when her headmaster father died of an epileptic seizure, leaving his school secretary wife with little Barbra and big brother Sheldon.

Barbra says: “My husband thinks I’m like the wild child in Mad Max. There’s a part of me that’s still unformed.

"Having only one parent is not unique, but it’s a particular kind of vacuum that is created, and maybe in that vacuum one’s imagination has to flourish – maybe it leaves an opening for a creative spark. You have to make the world more what it could be, rather than what it is.”

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Having released her 36th album last year, she certainly has an abundance of creativity.

She adds: “I think it’s a need to express, and also since I didn’t have discipline I was a wild child. We never ate at a table. I ate with one leg up and never knew you needed a napkin.

"We ate over a pot. My mother worked and we went to the kitchenette and ate what was in the pot. I bossed my mother around because there was no father. I remember being 10 years old and teaching her how to smoke. I had no discipline.”

Barbra’s mother telling her not to go into showbusiness was what made the rebellious teenager do just that.

By 16 she was living on her own in Manhattan, by 19 a Broadway star, and by 20 she had her first hit album.

Aged 26 she was conquering Hollywood, winning a best actress Oscar for her very first film, Funny Girl.

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She later became the first female composer to win an Oscar, for Evergreen – the love theme from 1976 film A Star Is Born, in which she starred.

Barbra also became the first woman to write, produce, direct and star in a major film, Yentl, for which she won yet another Oscar for best score – as well as two Golden Globes, becoming the first and only woman to win the best director award.

But she is best known for her singing, and is one of the best-selling recording artists of all time, with over 150 million albums and singles sold worldwide.

Barbra says she has never taken a singing lesson, but did once see a vocal coach after losing her voice. Now she puts that problem down to the impact of her split with Gould.

She says: “When I felt guilty about leaving my first husband, I lost my voice. All of a sudden I found myself on stage and couldn’t hold a note and i started thinking about how I do this? I went to this wonderful teacher for one session and said ‘You don’t have to learn this, you do it naturally.’”

She has never been shy about using her voice in other ways.

She hit a wrong note when she criticised the #MeToo movement, claiming “it’s going to cause a lot of women not being hired because men are worried that they’ll be attacked”.

She also caused controversy after appearing to sympathise with Michael Jackson over allegations of child abuse against him. She later wrote on Instagram that she was “profoundly sorry for any pain or misunderstanding caused”.

In her latest album, her first of self-penned songs since 2005, she criticises the presidency of Donald Trump.

She says: “This is a dangerous time: a man who is corrupt and indecent is assaulting our institutions.”

This week she hit out at the US President and his fellow climate crisis deniers, writing: “It is time for voters to remove the climate deniers from office. Starting with Trump.”

Because as Barbra has ably shown, if you have a voice, you must use it.