Cher (born May 20, 1946) is an American entertainer who has influenced popular culture across music, film, television, fashion and activism throughout a career spanning more than six decades. She first reached global audiences as one half of the folk rock duo Sonny & Cher, whose 1965 single "I Got You Babe" became an emblem of the 1960s counterculture. She is the only solo artist to top the US Billboard singles charts in seven consecutive decades and the only performer to hold both an Academy Award for acting and a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Widely referred to as the "Goddess of Pop", Cher has been credited by critics with establishing a template of theatrical, provocative, genre-fluid female pop performance, and her elaborate concert productions have influenced stadium-scale pop touring. Ryan Murphy said "it was Cher who turned transformation into an art form", adding that without her, "there might be no Madonna as we know her, no Prince, either". Cher's early solo songs address subjects then largely absent from American popular music, including divorce, prostitution and racism; Billboard has credited her with developing an androgynous musical identity that predated and informed the work of David Bowie and Patti Smith.
Cher has achieved successive returns to commercial prominence through repeated reinvention. Her music video for the 1980 disco single "Hell on Wheels" has been cited as a precursor to the modern music video, and her music video for the 1989 hair metal single "If I Could Turn Back Time"—filmed aboard the battleship —was the first music video banned by MTV. Her 1998 dance album Believe and its title track introduced the stylized use of Auto-Tune, later known as the "Cher effect" and adopted across pop, hip hop and electronic music. Contemporary artists who have cited Cher as an influence include Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Jennifer Lopez and Kanye West.
In television, Cher became a fixture of the variety show format: The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour (1971–1974) drew more than 30 million weekly viewers, with her playing the deadpan comedic lead to Sonny Bono's foil, a role reversal critics have credited with shifting how women were positioned in television comedy; her solo follow-up Cher (1975–1976) hosted David Bowie's American television debut, and Billboard credited Cher with bringing "a rock sensibility to prime-time television". She transitioned to film in the 1980s, winning the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actress for Mask (1985) and the Academy Award for Best Actress for Moonstruck (1987); her roles, often portraying independent, self-made women, mirror her public image. Professor Yvonne Tasker has cited her leading-actress career past age 40 as challenging industry norms privileging female youth. Following Cher's Academy Award win in 1988, Ms. magazine named her a defining feminist figure of the decade, and her 1996 retort "Mom, I am a rich man" endures as a feminist statement.
Cher is a fashion icon whose decades-long collaboration with designer Bob Mackie has influenced red-carpet conventions; her 1974 appearance at the Met Gala in a Mackie-designed "naked dress" marked a turning point in the event's red-carpet identity. In 1975, she fought CBS censors and became the first woman to deliberately expose her navel on American network television. Designers including Tom Ford, Marc Jacobs and Anna Sui have cited Cher as an inspiration. She is also a gay icon, recognized for her defiant self-presentation, early incorporation of drag into mainstream performance and long-standing LGBTQ advocacy. Her humanitarian work—channeled through amfAR, Keep a Child Alive and the Cher Charitable Foundation, among others—has addressed LGBTQ rights, veterans' welfare, HIV/AIDS relief, animal rights and advocacy for recognition of the Armenian genocide.
Performing career
Music
Music historian Annie Zaleski wrote in Cher's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction essay that she sings "nearly every style of music" effortlessly. Across her career, Cher has explored a range of genres including rock—spanning folk, punk, arena and pop subgenres—as well as soul, jazz, disco, new wave, power ballads, hip hop and electronic dance music, an eclecticism she framed as an attempt to "remain relevant and do work that strikes a chord".
Cher's musical career began in the mid-1960s, first through session work and then as one half of Sonny & Cher. As a backup singer under Phil Spector, she appeared on canonical Wall of Sound recordings such as the Ronettes' "Be My Baby" (1963) and the Righteous Brothers' "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" (1964). The Guardians Alexis Petridis described Cher's early work with Sonny Bono as "the sound of the growing 60s counterculture", while author Joseph Murrells called the duo "leading exponents of the rock-folk-message type of song", blending rock instrumentation, folk themes and protest lyrics.
Goldmines Phill Marder credited Cher's musical success to her "nearly flawless" song selection, noting that while Sonny contributed to early hits, most of her solo successes came from independent songwriters she chose. Cher's songbook has centered on heartbreak, independence and women's empowerment, positioning her, in the words of Outs Judy Wieder, as a "brokenhearted symbol of a strong but decidedly single woman".
Cher's contralto voice has been praised for its distinctiveness. Ann Powers of The New York Times described her voice as "a quintessential rock voice: impure, quirky [and] a fine vehicle for projecting personality." Her low timbre drew notice from the earliest stage of her career: many radio programmers rejected her 1964 debut single "Ringo, I Love You", mistaking her deep voice for a male vocal and assuming it was a gay man singing to the Beatles drummer Ringo Starr. On her first charting solo single "All I Really Want to Do", Cher's voice dips so low on alternating lines that Atlantic Records president Ahmet Ertegun became convinced Sonny was singing alongside her, which would have constituted a breach of contract.
Cher's debut album, All I Really Want to Do (1965), was praised by AllMusic's Tim Sendra as "one of the stronger folk-pop records of the era". Upon its release, the Byrds withdrew their competing version of the Bob Dylan-written title song; Roger McGuinn recalled, "We loved the Cher version ... We didn't want to hassle. So we just turned our record over." AllMusic's Mark Deming later judged 3614 Jackson Highway (1969) "the finest album of her career" and "still a revelation four decades after it was released".
Writing about Cher's musical output during the 1960s, Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times stated that "rock was subsequently blessed with the staggering blues exclamations of Janis Joplin in the late '60s and the raw poetic force of Patti Smith in the mid-'70s. Yet no one matched the pure, seductive wallop of Cher". By contrast, her 1970s vocals were described by Eder as "dramatic, highly intense ... [and] almost as much 'acted' as sung".
Some of Cher's early solo songs address subjects rarely explored in American popular music, such as divorce, prostitution, unplanned and underaged pregnancy, and racism. Ryan Murphy of the Miami Herald described the thematic arc of those recordings as "awash with longing and themes of insecurity", arguing that "Half-Breed" and "Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves", "as campy as they are, speak of a woman in search not of an identity—she has always had that—but acceptance".
According to AllMusic's Joe Viglione, Cher's 1972 single "The Way of Love" reads "either about a woman expressing her love for another woman or a woman saying au revoir to a gay male she loved", and her ability to carry both male and female ranges allowed her to sing solo in androgynous and gender-neutral songs. Hilburn added, "There were a lot of great records by female singers in the early days of rock ... None, however, reflected the authority and command that we associate with rock 'n' roll today as much as [Cher's] key early hits".
Cher's 1975 album Stars, recorded during her push to establish herself as a rock artist, drew praise from Richard Seeley of the Daily Breeze as "an important link between the rock and roll subculture and the mass popular music audience", with Seeley noting that Cher showed "real talent" by choosing lesser-known rock songwriters over "surefire hit makers like John [Lennon] and [Paul] McCartney". First heard on the 1980 record Black Rose, her sharper, more aggressive vocals on hard rock-oriented albums established her sexually confident image. The album, recorded with a short-lived band she formed with guitarist Les Dudek, received poor reviews; she told Rolling Stone that critics "didn't attack the record, they attacked me. It was like, 'How dare Cher sing rock & roll?'" AllMusic's Donald A. Guarisco praised her 1981 duet with Meat Loaf, "Dead Ringer for Love", as "one of the more inspired rock duets of the 1980s".
Murphy read Cher's late-1980s recordings as evidence of a shift in sensibility, writing that "We All Sleep Alone" "reverberates with the struggle to deal with success and its isolating effects" and that "I Found Someone" "is not about a stiletto-grinding female out to burn an ex as much as it is about sheer resilience. This music, like the new, improved Cher, is about maturity of spirit." Reviewing her 1991 album Love Hurts in Entertainment Weekly, Jim Farber praised Cher's "sexually autonomous persona" as "one of the surest of any pop female", noting how she turned heartbreak lyrics into expressions of revenge rather than victimhood. For 1995's It's a Man's World, by contrast, she restrained her vocals, singing in higher registers and without vibrato; Stephen Holden of The New York Times wrote that "From an artistic standpoint, this soulful collection of grown-up pop songs ... is the high point of her recording career."
Cher's 1998 song "Believe" was the first commercial recording to use Auto-Tune—an audio processor for correcting off-key vocals—as a stylistic effect, creating a robotic, futuristic sound. According to Rolling Stones Christopher R. Weingarten, the producers "used the pitch correction software not as a way to fix mistakes in Cher's iconic voice, but as an aesthetic tool". Cher, who proposed the effect, faced resistance from her label but insisted it remain, saying, "You can change [the song] over my dead body". The technique came to be known as the "Cher effect", a name adopted by the manual for Auto-Tune's fifth release. Pitchforks Simon Reynolds described it as having "revolutionized the sound of popular music" and as "the sound of the 21st century". Cher used Auto-Tune extensively on Living Proof (2001) and later albums.
AllMusic's Jose F. Promis described Cher's 2000 album Not Commercial, largely self-written during a songwriting camp in 1994, as carrying a "1970s singer-songwriter feel" that highlights her storytelling skills. She chose the title after her label's chief dismissed the project as "nice, but not commercial" and rejected it for its explicit language and bleak content, including personal trauma, homelessness, veteran neglect and the suicide of Kurt Cobain. She sold it independently on her website, an unusual move for an artist under contract with a major label. One of its songs, "Sisters of Mercy", described the nuns who prevented her mother from retrieving her from a Catholic orphanage as "daughters of hell", drawing condemnation from the Catholic Church.
Stage and television