Cher

Cheryl Sarkisian was born on May 20, 1946, in El Centro, California, to John Sarkisian, an Armenian-American truck driver, and Georgia Holt, a model and actress of Irish, English, German, and Cherokee descent. Her paternal grandparents were survivors of the Armenian genocide. Her parents divorced when she was ten months old, and her father placed her briefly in an orphanage before departing, leaving Holt to visit only through a window once a week. In 1951, Holt married actor John Southall, with whom she had Cher's half-sister, Georganne. After that marriage ended, Holt remarried and divorced several times, relocating the family across New York, Texas, and California. Financial hardship was a constant, and Cher later recalled using rubber bands to hold her shoes together. While the family lived in Los Angeles, Holt pursued acting and waitressing, occasionally securing minor television roles for her daughters on programs such as The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.

As a child, Cher organized a class performance of the musical Oklahoma! by fifth grade, taking on male roles when boys declined to participate. She idolized Audrey Hepburn, particularly for the character's unconventional style in Breakfast at Tiffany's, and also admired Marlene Dietrich, Bette Davis, and Katharine Hepburn, though she felt discouraged by the scarcity of dark-haired actresses in Hollywood. In 1961, Holt married bank manager Gilbert LaPiere, who adopted Cher under the name Cheryl LaPiere and enrolled her at Montclair College Preparatory School in Encino. Cher excelled in French and English but struggled with other subjects, later discovering she has dyslexia.

At sixteen, Cher left school and moved out of her mother's home, taking acting classes and supporting herself by dancing in nightclubs along Hollywood's Sunset Strip. She met Sonny Bono in November 1962 while he was working for record producer Phil Spector. Spector used Cher as a backing vocalist on recordings including the Righteous Brothers' "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" and the Ronettes' "Be My Baby," and produced her first single, "Ringo, I Love You," released in early 1964 under the name Bonnie Jo Mason. Cher and Sonny held an unofficial wedding ceremony in Tijuana, Mexico, on October 27, 1964, and she encouraged him to perform alongside her onstage due to her stage fright, with the two going on to form the folk rock duo Sonny & Cher.

The duo rose to fame in 1965 when their single "I Got You Babe" became emblematic of 1960s counterculture. Cher simultaneously pursued a solo career, releasing moody pop songs including "Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)," whose theatrical storytelling foreshadowed her 1970s US Billboard Hot 100 number-one singles "Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves," "Half-Breed," and "Dark Lady." In the 1970s, she became a television star through The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour and her solo variety show Cher, both on CBS, each drawing more than 30 million weekly viewers.

In 1982, Cher made her Broadway debut in Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, a credit that remains part of her verified stage record. The production was subsequently adapted into a film the same year, for which she received critical acclaim. Transitioning further into film, she earned Academy Award nominations for Silkwood in 1983 and Moonstruck in 1987, winning Best Actress for the latter. She received the Cannes Film Festival's Best Actress Award for Mask in 1985. Additional starring roles include The Witches of Eastwick (1987), Mermaids (1990), If These Walls Could Talk (1996, which she also directed), Tea with Mussolini (1999), Burlesque (2010), and Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (2018).

Following a period focused on acting, Cher returned to recording with the hair metal albums Cher (1987), Heart of Stone (1989), and Love Hurts (1991), which produced the international number-one hits "If I Could Turn Back Time" and "The Shoop Shoop Song (It's in His Kiss)." At fifty-two, she released the dance-pop album Believe (1998), introducing what became known as the "Cher effect," a stylized application of Auto-Tune to distort vocals. The album's title track reached number one in the United States in 1999 and became the best-selling single by a female artist in the United Kingdom. In the twenty-first century, her albums Closer to the Truth (2013) and Dancing Queen (2018) each debuted at number three on the US Billboard 200, her highest chart positions on that ranking.

Cher has sold over 100 million records and is the only solo artist to have achieved number-one singles on the US Billboard charts across seven consecutive decades, from the 1960s through the 2020s. Her 2002–2005 Living Proof: The Farewell Tour earned $250 million, approximately $410 million in 2025 dollars, making it the highest-grossing concert tour by a female artist at that time. Her accolades include two Grammy Awards, among them the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, three Golden Globe Awards, the Billboard Icon Award, and the Kennedy Center Honors. She is the only performer to have won an Academy Award for acting and also been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Her life and career served as the basis for the 2018 jukebox musical The Cher Show. Beyond entertainment, she has been publicly active in advocacy for LGBTQ rights and HIV/AIDS awareness.