Irene Sharaff won five Academy Awards for costume design: An American in Paris, The King and I, Cleopatra and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? She was also nominated for five Tony Awards. Sharaff designed stage and screen costumes for West Side Story as well as Funny Girl—again, costumes for both the stage play and film.
“I see everything in blocks of color,” Sharaff said about her style, “rather like a painting. If I have a leitmotif, a logo, I suspect it is associated with the colors I prefer: reds, pinks, oranges.”
To the press, Irene Sharaff was complimentary to Streisand, who she deemed was “an elegant original and one of the great beauties of our day. She is proof that regular features are not a prerequisite for being a beauty.”
Ray Diffen, who worked with Sharaff on the stage version of Funny Girl wrote in his autobiography that Sharaff “took an instant dislike to Barbra.” In her memoir, Sharaff wrote: “Barbra with her logorrhea expressed her opinions freely and endlessly about everyone and everything, including the technique of movie making.”
(Streisand has never shared her opinion of Miss Sharaff.)
More from Sharaff’s book: “Barbra had an extraordinary memory about movies and stars. With the strong streak of Walter Mitty in her, she would turn up at fittings impersonating stars, usually of the twenties ...”
