On this day in 1891, actress and singer Fanny Brice is born. Brice rose from her poor Jewish immigrant roots to become one of America’s most beloved comedians. Barbara Streisand portrayed her in the movie Funny Girl (1968), and won an Oscar for the performance.

Brice, born Fannie Borach in 1891 on the Lower East Side of New York, was the daughter of Jewish immigrants who ran a saloon. At age 13, she won the $10 first prize in an amateur Brooklyn talent contest and dropped out of eighth grade to play piano, sing, and help out in the projection room of a local movie house. She landed a job as a chorus-line dancer with George M. Cohan but lost it when he discovered she couldn’t dance. Her luck changed in 1910, when Florenz Ziegfeld heard Brice sing in a burlesque house and put her in the Ziegfeld Follies that year, paying her $75 a week. Her real stardom, however, came in the 1921 Follies, when she introduced her trademark torch song, “My Man,” which brought many audience members to tears. The song was purportedly about Brice’s second husband, gambler Nicky Arnstein, who was sent to prison several times during their marriage and later abandoned her and their two children. Soon after that stunning performance, Brice got a raise to $3,000 a week. Though she had hoped to make it as a serious actress and singer, comedy was her natural talent. Audiences adored her satirical dialogue and hilarious Yiddish dialect numbers. Onstage, she created a character called Babykins in 1921 and refined the character in the 1931 film Crazy Quilt. By 1934, the bratty toddler, renamed “Baby Snooks,” had started making radio appearances and had her own radio show by the mid 1940s, which ran until Brice’s death in 1951.