Cher

Cher was born Cherilyn Sarkisian on May 20, 1946, in El Centro, a farming town in California's Imperial Valley near the Mexican border ^[1]. Her father, John Sarkisian, was an Armenian American truck driver who left the family when she was an infant. Her mother, Georgia Holt, born Jackie Jean Crouch, was an aspiring actress and model of English and Cherokee descent who married and remarried several times, moving the family around California and briefly to other states ^[2].

The household was often short of money. Holt sometimes worked as a waitress while pursuing small acting jobs, and for a period she placed her daughter in the care of a Catholic institution while she struggled to support her. Cher later described a childhood marked by instability but also by her mother's encouragement to perform, sing and be self reliant ^[2].

She attended Fresno High School and later Montclair College Preparatory School in Los Angeles County but left school at sixteen without graduating. Undiagnosed dyslexia made classroom work difficult, a condition she only identified as an adult ^[3]. She moved to Los Angeles, took acting classes and supported herself with odd jobs while looking for a way into show business, a starting point that features in nearly every Cher biography.

In late 1962 the sixteen year old Cherilyn met Sonny Bono, an ambitious songwriter and promotion man eleven years her senior who worked for producer Phil Spector at Gold Star Studios in Hollywood ^[1]. Bono brought her into Spector's orbit, and she sang backing vocals on Spector productions, including sessions for the Ronettes and the Righteous Brothers ^[4].

Sonny and Cher began performing together, first under the name Caesar and Cleo, and broke through in the summer of 1965 with I Got You Babe, a Bono composition that reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 ^[1]. The duo's mix of pop harmonies, bell bottoms and fur vests made them emblems of mid 1960s youth culture, and they placed a string of singles on the charts, among them The Beat Goes On. During the same period Cher launched a parallel solo recording career, scoring hits with Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down) in 1966 ^[4].

When record sales faded at the end of the decade, the pair reinvented themselves as a nightclub and television act built around Cher's deadpan wit and Bono's role as comic foil. The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour premiered on CBS in 1971 and became a ratings success, running until 1974 and making Cher, with her Bob Mackie designed costumes, one of the most watched women on American television ^[5]. Her solo recording career surged at the same time: Gypsys, Tramps and Thieves (1971), Half Breed (1973) and Dark Lady (1974) all reached number one in the United States ^[4].

For anyone asking who was Cher at her peak, the answer changed by the decade, which is itself the achievement. After the duo's divorce and the end of their television partnership, she hosted her own variety series, Cher, on CBS in 1975 and 1976, and continued recording through the disco era, topping the chart again in 1979 with Take Me Home ^[5].

In the early 1980s she made a deliberate turn to serious acting. Robert Altman cast her in the Broadway production and 1982 film of Come Back to the 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, and Mike Nichols then gave her a supporting role in Silkwood (1983), which earned her an Academy Award nomination ^[6]. She won the Best Actress prize at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival for Mask, and in 1987 released three films: The Witches of Eastwick, Suspect and Moonstruck. Her performance as Loretta Castorini in Moonstruck won the Academy Award for Best Actress, presented in April 1988 ^[6].

Her recording career kept pace. Rock oriented albums produced hits such as I Found Someone (1987) and If I Could Turn Back Time (1989). Then, at age 52, she released Believe (1998), a dance track famous for its pioneering, audible use of Auto-Tune as a vocal effect. The single reached number one in the United States and many other countries and won the Grammy Award for Best Dance Recording in 2000, making her, at the time, the oldest woman to top the Hot 100 as a lead artist ^[4]. Among the most cited Cher facts is that she has had number one or top ten records across six consecutive decades. Sonny and Cher were inducted into the Hollywood Walk of Fame, she received the Kennedy Center Honors in 2018, and in 2024 she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ^[7].

Cher and Sonny Bono married in the 1960s and had one child, Chaz Bono, born in 1969. The marriage dissolved amid professional and personal strains, and the divorce was finalized in 1975 ^[1]. Days later she married southern rock musician Gregg Allman of the Allman Brothers Band; their son, Elijah Blue Allman, was born in 1976, and the couple divorced in 1979 ^[2].

Her relationships with younger men in the 1980s, including bagel shop worker turned actor Rob Camilletti, drew heavy tabloid coverage, which she met with characteristic bluntness. She remained on complicated but ultimately warm terms with Bono, delivering an emotional eulogy at his funeral after he died in a skiing accident in January 1998, by which time he was a Republican congressman from California ^[1].

Chaz Bono came out as a lesbian in 1995 and later transitioned, becoming one of the most prominent transgender men in American public life. Cher has spoken openly about her initial difficulty with the transition and her eventual full support, and she has been a longtime ally of LGBTQ audiences, who embraced her early in her solo career ^[3]. She has also discussed her dyslexia, her Armenian heritage, and her charitable work, including support for children's causes through the Cher Charitable Foundation and public advocacy after the 1988 Armenian earthquake region visits in later years ^[3].

Cher announced a farewell to live performance with the Living Proof: The Farewell Tour, which ran from 2002 to 2005 across more than 300 dates and became one of the highest grossing tours by a female artist up to that point ^[4]. The farewell proved provisional. She returned with a Las Vegas residency at Caesars Palace from 2008 to 2011, then mounted the Dressed to Kill Tour in 2014 and the Here We Go Again Tour beginning in 2018 ^[5].

Her film work continued at a slower pace. She starred opposite Christina Aguilera in Burlesque (2010) and joined the ensemble of Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (2018), which led to Dancing Queen, an album of ABBA covers that debuted in the top five of the Billboard 200 ^[4]. In 2018 she received the Kennedy Center Honors in Washington, and a jukebox musical about her life, The Cher Show, opened on Broadway the same year, winning a Tony Award for its star Stephanie J. Block ^[7].

In 2023 she released Christmas, her first holiday album, which included the hit DJ Play a Christmas Song, and in 2024 she published the first volume of Cher: The Memoir, which became a New York Times bestseller ^[8]. Her Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in October 2024 came after years in which she had publicly questioned the institution for overlooking her ^[7].

Few American entertainers have sustained reinvention on Cher's scale. She moved from folk pop duo to television comedy to disco, from Oscar winning drama to arena dance music, holding mass audiences in each form. Music writers credit Believe with normalizing Auto-Tune as a creative tool, an effect sometimes called the Cher effect, and her chart longevity across six decades remains a benchmark cited in industry retrospectives ^[4].

Her visual style, especially the beaded and feathered Bob Mackie gowns she wore on television and at award ceremonies, reshaped ideas of what a mainstream star could wear, and costume exhibitions and fashion histories regularly return to her red carpet moments ^[5]. Among Cher achievements that endure beyond the awards themselves is the template she set for the multi platform career: the singer who becomes a credible film actress, the television personality who fills stadiums, the veteran who tops dance charts.

She is also a case study in candor. Her interviews, her late night social media posts and her willingness to discuss aging, failure and reinvention have kept her culturally present for generations born long after I Got You Babe. Halls of fame, honorary tributes and academic writing on gender and celebrity all record the same conclusion: Cher turned persistence itself into an art form ^[6].