Photo: Sexy Barbra Streisand Graces Cover of W Magazine's December Issue

Star of stage and screen, Barbra Streisand graces the December cover of W magazine, photographed by Steven Meisel, and proves that you can still be smokin' hot at age 74! In the issue's exclusive interview, the award winning actress and songstress shares,"strong women are, simply women with opinions." She also reveals that she is currently working on a memoir.

Speaking on her iconic performance in Broadway's FUNNY GIRL, Streisand comments, "When I won the Oscar for best actress, I said, "Thank God it took you so long to get it right!" But I started with Funny Girl on Broadway. I literally did it a thousand times, and since I'm a kind of anal-retentive perfectionist, I would give notes after every performance. I couldn't stand it if the SILK flowers had dust on them. I would get disconcerted by the fact that the fake flowers didn't look as fresh as possible, and so on. I even gave notes on our very last performance, and there were no performances after that!"

Read the interview in full HERE.

This fall, Streisand released her newest album "ENCORE: Movie Partners Sing Broadway". A best-selling female recording artist, she has recorded 52 gold, 31 platinum and 13 multi-platinum albums in her career. She is the only woman to make the All-Time Top 10 Best Selling Artists list. Streisand also has the longest span of number one albums in history, just under 52 years.

With her live performances being so rare and special, the excitement surrounding a Streisand tour is unequaled. Following a 27-year hiatus from live concerts, Streisand's 1994 world tour garnered a record-setting 5 million phone requests to Ticketmaster and sold out within the first hour. Her shows in fall 2006 broke house records in 14 of the 16 venues in which she played (in the other two arenas, Streisand already held the buildings' records).

Streisand's 2012 tour, BACK TO BROOKLYN, highlighted an emotional return to performing in concert in her home borough for the first time since she was in grade school. Of the first of her Brooklyn shows, which helped inaugurate the brand new Barclays Center, The New York Times praised Streisand's "spellbinding voice" and noted, "Like few singers of any age, she has the gift of conveying a primal human longing in a beautiful sound." The Los Angeles Times said she "put the audience immediately under the spell of her folksy grandiosity. Streisand ... isn't just a star - she's a world view, a style of being, an entire cosmology, with the highest possible thread-count sheets. You don't just come for the music; you come for the whole church service. The sermon, broken up into bits, is inseparable from the songs."

Following a North American run, the tour broke records throughout Europe, and culminated in two spine-tingling performances in Israel, thrilling crowds who "loved her even before a perfectly-pitched note came out of her mouth," as described by Haaretz, "and every note was, indeed perfect."

Widely recognized as an icon in multiple entertainment fields, Streisand has attained unprecedented achievements as a recording artist, actor, concert performer, producer, director, author and songwriter. Streisand has been awarded two Oscars, five Emmys, ten Golden Globes, eight Grammys plus two special Grammys, a special Tony award in 1970, and two CableACE Awards - the only artist to receive honors in all of those fields of endeavor. Streisand received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama this past November. Her many other honors include the American Film Institute's Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Endowment for the Arts Medal, three Peabody Awards and the French Légion d'Honneur. She is also the first female film director to receive the KENNEDY Center Honors.

Photo: Steven Meisel/Courtesy of W Magazine

Photo Credit: Walter McBride / WM Photos