Cher determination: Inside the skill, scandal and survival of pop’s most immortal star

To understand Cher – and her six decades of global stardom – you have to go back to Dumbo. When the young Cherilyn Sarkisian first saw the 1941 Disney film, at the age of four in 1950, it had a profound effect on her. On screen, the animated elephant is bullied because of his large ears, but soon realises he can use them to fly. Only, though, if he truly believes in himself. Gazing up at the screen as the soaring outsider won the admiration of his circus peers, Cher – a shy, wild, severely dyslexic child – whispered to her mum that this was what she wanted to do with her life.

In a 2022 commercial for Ugg boots, Cher recalled that her mother’s response was to laugh. “You can’t be a cartoon character!” she told her. But the determined child knew better. “I thought: why not? I can sing, I can dance, I can run around and be funny. This is what I’ll do when I grow up!”

She did it, too. Cher’s voice may have been so big that Phil Spector once asked her to stand metres back from the microphone while she sang back-up for acts such as The Ronettes. It may have also been so deep that DJs refused to play her debut single because they thought she was a man singing a love song to another man. But she harnessed all the strength of that mighty voice and took it flying to the top of the British charts in 1965 singing “I Got You Babe” with then-husband Sonny Bono.

She’d go on to clown about on TV’s Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour in the 1970s; win a Golden Globe acting opposite Meryl Streep in gritty drama Silkwood (1983) and an Oscar for her passionate turn as the Italian-American heroine in Moonstruck (1987). In 1998, she’d record a track called “Believe” that remains the UK’s all-time best-selling single by a solo artist. It’s her survival against the odds that has made her such a heroine for her legion of LGBTQ fans over the years. Likewise her flamboyant showgirl feathers, giant headdresses and barely-there frocks. And with her dark hair and strong facial structure, she always stood out in a sea of superficially cuter female pop stars.

This week she re-releases two of her late-career pop records: 2001’s Living Proof, and 2013’s Closer to the Truth, both of which find her in her full-throttle pomp as the goddess of the gay dancefloor. Both albums caused some tutting in critical circles at the time of their releases, with Living Proof receiving more than its fair share of flack for its heavy use of the Auto-Tune technology that Cher had pioneered on “Believe”. The pitch-correcting tech had initially been developed as a bit of a lark between sound engineers, after one of their wives joked that she needed help singing. But although the software was created to assist artists unable to hit the right notes, Cher – someone more than able to nail a tune – used it as a modern way to fuse with the electricity of the beat. It meant she could literally lose herself in the music, sharing her strength with everybody moving along to it.

This strength seems to have been embedded in Cher from birth. Born in El Centro, California, in 1946, Cherilyn Sarkisian was the daughter of a former model and actor (who began a history of familial reinvention by changing her name from Jackie Crouch to Georgia Holt), and an Armenian American truck driver. Her father’s problems with drugs and gambling saw her parents divorce by the time she was 10 months old. But an echo of his vagabond vices can be heard on her first solo No 1, 1971’s “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves”, on which she sang from the point of view of a Romani girl shunned by mainstream society until nightfall – when the men would come to “lay their money down”.

Like the heroine of her 1990 film Mermaids, Cher’s single mum moved around, living at various points in New York, Los Angeles and Texas, and repeatedly reinvented herself. She remarried several times. Money was so short that Cher has spoken of holding her shoes together with elastic bands and being briefly left at an orphanage. In a recent interview with Rylan for the BBC, Cher described running away from home by leaping onto a horse and riding bareback to the train tracks, where she proceeded to hop onto a freight train and lie back until it hit the buffers.

Young Cherilyn was a quiet child, someone who grew up in thrall to Golden Age movie stars such as Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn and Marlene Dietrich – tough, dynamic, plot-driving women. She finally blossomed around the age of 11, when she put together a school production of the musical Oklahoma!. Unable to talk boys into participating, she took on all the male roles herself. A classmate is quoted in Connie Berman’s 2001 biography as saying: “I’ll never forget seeing Cher for the first time. She was so special ... She was like a movie star, right then and there.”

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Cher dropped out of school at 16 and devoted herself to networking her way around Hollywood, dancing and singing in bars to make the rent before taking a job in 1962 as housekeeper to her future husband – svengali and bandmate, Salvatore “Sonny” Bono. It was through Bono that she ended up working as a backing singer for Phil Spector, who relished the rich mahogany tone of her voice. He made her the lone female backing vocalist on the Righteous Brothers’ hit “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling”. Spector was already starting to behave in an erratic and predatory manner in the studio. But the teenage Cher was more than able to shock him out of her space. In a 2018 interview with The Guardian, she recalled: “Phil asked me, in French, if I would have sex with him. And I said, in French, ‘Yes – for money.’ He almost fell off his chair. He didn’t expect that from anyone.” She also recalls that Spector asked her to “watch” his then-wife Ronnie for him and report back. Cher refused. “‘No f***ing way!’” she said. “I wasn’t going to nark on these girls. They were my friends.”

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After a few failed attempts at launching a career with Bono – they capitalised on her dark, powerful looks by branding themselves “Caesar & Cleopatra” – the duo bumped into the Rolling Stones, who savvily suggested the British might prefer their hippy looks to the straighter laced Americans. “In America, we were getting beaten up for the way we looked,” Cher later recalled. “We had to go to London where people understood us and respected us. England has been lucky for me more than once.”

Although the pair are best known for the cutesy “I Got You Babe”, the track tends to grate on repeated listening – as sent up in the 1993 film Groundhog Day, when it started every day on the hero’s clock radio. But the duo’s talents were much better served by “And the Beat Goes On” (1967), a song that really allowed Cher to showcase the sultry swing of her vocal. Swaying nonchalantly over the passing of fads – and the blasé groove of Carol Kaye’s bass – Cher seemed to know she’d remain at the mic regardless of shifting trends and times.

In recent years Cher has used her inability to “see” numbers to joke about her refusal to “act her age”, and her string of younger boyfriends (she’s also winked that now she’s 78, all the men her own age are dead, anyway). But back in the Sixties her lack of numeracy may have contributed to the control Bono had over her career and earnings. When she filed for divorce in 1974, she cited “involuntary servitude” as her reason for ending the marriage. When the divorce was finally settled in 1978, she secured a 50 per cent stake in their catalogue – although she’s only just clawed back money earned since Bono’s death in 1998 from his widow.

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I’ve got a soft spot for the Jimmy Webb-produced album Cher made in the wake of her split from Bono. Although she didn’t write a single song on it, 1975’s Stars still feels like her “singer-songwriter” record, with lines written by the likes of Webb and Neil Young imbued with a confessional spirit. Her version of “Love Hurts” (previously recorded by Roy Orbison and Gram Parsons) really swills around the stomach. It’s freighted with bitter experience and yet strangely forgiving – typical of a woman who managed to hug Bono after their divorce came through, telling The Guardian she just “couldn’t stay mad at him”.

Although Cher made her name dressing in kaftans, she’d soon embrace skimpier styles, later becoming the first woman to show her belly button on television. After her divorce from Bono, she caused a scandal by wearing a “naked dress” to the Met Gala, which she attended arm-in-arm with the costume’s designer Bob Mackie. He laughs now at the fuss she caused in the “flammable” frock, noting that Cher wore it with casual panache, as though she were in a T-shirt and jeans. When she wore the dress again for the cover of Time magazine the following year, newsstands ran out of copies in some states, while the edition was banned in others. In 1989, MTV even banned her video for “If I Could Turn Back Time” because she was wearing a fishnet thong bodysuit.

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When Cher struggled to find success in music in the early Eighties, she fell back to her first love: acting. On screen, she transmitted a raw vulnerability that surprised those who’d pigeonholed her as a show pony. We saw her weary, frustrated, and sitting make-up free at kitchen tables. Not a sequin in sight.

Although she struggled to become a multi-hyphenate in an era when artists – and particularly female ones – were expected to stay in their lane, Cher shrugged off the haters. “Singers never thought I was a singer and actors never thought I was an actor,” she has said. But audiences remained mesmerised by her charisma.

There’s a strange stillness to Cher. Both on record and on screen she transmits a compelling self-possession and groundedness. Perhaps her peripatetic childhood forced her to become her own home planet, with her own gravitational pull. You can see this demonstrated brilliantly in her show-stealing turn in 2018’s Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again. Playing the celebrity grandmother of the movie’s heroine (Amanda Seyfried), she steps out of a black helicopter in a white suit and delivers an authoritative cover of ABBA’s “Fernando”. It’s both the purest, giddiest camp and the most solemn expression of pure love all wrapped into one pop song. Like the cartoon character she once yearned to be, Cher is freeze-framed but in motion.

The flipside to this aspect of Cher can also make her seem detached and remote. Reviews of her 2023 Christmas album were divided. The first time I played it, I remember feeling that its electro-pop was superficially shining but emotionally hollow – an audio bauble. But there are also times when it is precisely Cher’s distance you need to channel. It can make for terrific dancefloor armour. Against the plucked banjo, thudding drum and handclaps of “I Walk Alone” from Closer to the Truth, Cher sings that “there’s a sadness in my confessions/ there’s a hyena howling at the moon/ there’s a gypsy in me that keeps on roaming/ And there’s an anger as I get closer to the truth… I gotta walk alone.”

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In recent years that anger has been increasingly targeted at the Trump administration and anti-trans activists. Ever frank, Cher admitted she struggled when her own child, actor, author and musician Chaz Bono, transitioned. But she’s become a staunch ally of the trans community, while the love has been returned.

In that 2023 interview with Rylan, Cher reminisced about the period when she was living in London and recording “Believe”. She said that she’d altered the lyrics to shift the mood from heartbreak to survival. Then she described the apartment in which she lived at the time. Apparently it boasted a huge swing, on which she could sit and whoosh out across the balcony and over the Thames. Like Dumbo, she just needed to believe. Only then could she fly.