Cher is immensely famous, and has been since 1965 when she had a #1 hit with "
I Got You Babe" as part of the duo Sonny & Cher. She was 20 years old at the time and partnered with Sonny, who was 11 years older.
She hosted three different variety shows in the '70s, two of them with Sonny. First was The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour, which launched in 1971 and ran until 1974 even though she and Sonny split up in 1972. In 1975, she hosted a similar show solo, simply called Cher, which ran for one season. By this time, their divorce had been finalized and Cher was married to Gregg Allman.
She and Sonny took another crack at it with The Sonny and Cher Show, which launched on February 1, 1976, when Cher was pregnant with Elijah Blue Allman. That show ran into 1977.
Before she met Sonny, Cher had a fling with Warren Beatty in 1962. She's dated celebrities like David Geffen (1973-1974), Gene Simmons (1977-1980) and Val Kilmer (1982-1984), but one of her longest-lasting loves was Rob Camilletti, who was working in a bagel shop when they started seeing each other in 1986. He's 18 years younger than Cher, so she became comedy fodder for robbing the cradle. After the broke up in 1989, Cher found another star partner: Richie Sambora of Bon Jovi.
Cher was the lead singer in a rock band called Black Rose that released an eponymous album in 1980 before calling it quits. They opened a few shows for Hall & Oates but Cher insisted they not use her name in any of the promotional materials, so audience members got a surprise when they went on. The band didn't last very long but did make an
appearance on The Midnight Special.
Cher is dyslexic, which went undiagnosed in school and led to lots of report cards stating that she was not living up to her potential. She had to learn by listening rather than reading. With no luck in school, she dropped out at 16 and moved to Los Angeles where he found her place in the entertainment industry.
The dyslexia is countervailed with what Cher describes as a nearly photographic memory. "If I read something slowly once, I can remember it almost in its entirety," she explained to Q magazine. "Usually, dyslexic people have some other sense or faculty that's very highly tuned to compensate."
Cher had an on-off relationship with Gregg Allman starting in 1975 and divorcing in 1979. Their union resulted in one album, the punningly titled
Allman and Woman: Two The Hard Way. By the late '70s, she became a regular fixture in gossip columns and fashion magazines, which lauded over her sartorial outrageousness and much publicized musical and personal relationships.
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Sharilyn - Sinclair , MN
In 1981, Cher appeared on Meat Loaf's "Dead Ringer For Love" but recording interests increasingly took a back seat to her first love: acting. A leading role in
Come Back To The Five And Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982) was followed by a lucrative part in
Silkwood (1983), and an Oscar nomination. Appearances in
Mask (1985),
The Witches Of Eastwick (1987) and
Suspect (1987) emphasized that her thespian aspirations were no mere sideline. For
Moonstruck (1987), she won an Oscar for Best Actress.
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She was born Cherilyn Sarkisian LaPierre in El Centro, California. She is of Armenian and Native American (Cherokee) decent. Cher's parents divorced when she was 10 months old and, at one point, neither of them could care for her. Her father, a truck driver with drug and gambling problems, took her to Scranton, Pennsylvania, and placed her in a Catholic orphanage while her mother worked in an all-night diner trying to earn enough money to reclaim her.
Cher's time in the orphanage was brief and occurred when she was very young, so she doesn't have any memories of it. Her mother eventually managed to bring her back home.
Her solo career ran side-by-side with Sonny & Cher starting in 1965, when she had two solo chart hits and Sonny & Cher had five. Both acts waned from 1968-1970, but Cher revived her career with a string of #1 hits, starting in 1971 with "
Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves," followed by "
Half-Breed" in 1973 and "
Dark Lady" in 1974. These songs she recorded with producer Snuff Garrett and were a lot edgier than what she recorded with Sonny Bono.
Cher has two children: Chaz Bono (born 1969) with Sonny Bono, and Elijah Blue Allman (born 1976) with Greg Allman.
When "
You Haven't Seen The Last Of Me" hit #1 on the Dance Club chart in 2010, it gave Cher #1 Billboard chart singles in all six decades from the 1960s to the 2010s.
In the '70s, Cher raised eyebrows for showing her belly button on TV as part of her revealing outfits. In the late '80s and early '90s, she was known for showing her butt in a getup with fishnet stockings and a leather jacket, most notably in the video for "
If I Could Turn Back Time."
A
Cher celebrity doll with "growing hair" was America's top-selling doll of 1976, beating the usual bestseller, Barbie.
She remained active into her 70s with tours, movies, music and various other projects. When asked at a press junket in 1991 what she'd be doing at 70, she predicted a different future: "I'd like to see myself far, far away from work, on an island someplace, just pottering around in my house, gardening and sculpting, completely away from civilization."
Many of her fans thought she had died after the hashtag #nowthatchersdead (now that cher's dead) appeared on Twitter on April 8, 2013. It actually referred to former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (now thatchers dead).
Cher set a British record in 1999 when aged 52 years and 7 months, she became the oldest woman to top the UK singles chart with "
Believe."
Cher is not a fan of her voice. "It doesn't sound like a man, it doesn't sound like a woman,"
she told Paper magazine. "I'm somewhere more in-between. I have this strange style. I do what you do when you can't hold a note: I don't pronounce my R's. I guess some consonants are hard to sing, so I just gotta leave them open."
Cher's adventurous spirit was evident from a young age. At just nine years old, she once borrowed a horse and hopped a freight train, venturing all the way to Santa Ana. Her only fear during this wild ride was when her friend grew scared as night fell. Cher's mom, who was surprisingly unperturbed by the incident, only expressed concern about Cher throwing away her lunch pail during the escapade. This fearless act was a precursor to her later reinventions in music and fashion, cementing her as a trailblazer in every sense of the word.
Cher first met Sonny Bono when she was 16 years old (he was 27) while waiting in line for coffee at Aldo's Coffee Shop in Los Angeles, She recalled on the Today show how it felt like a dramatic moment out of West Side Story where "everybody disappeared." Cher was struck not by his physical attractiveness but by his style - he wore a mohair suit, a mustard-colored shirt with a white collar, a matching tie, and an elegant ID bracelet that was also a watch.
At the time, Cher was struggling financially and had recently quit her job. Sonny, noticing her situation, offered her a place to stay. Their initial living arrangement was platonic, and Sonny even told her he didn't find her particularly attractive. This gesture marked the start of their eventual romantic and professional partnership, which later blossomed into Sonny & Cher.
