Cher has scored a number-one single in seven decades running
No other solo act has topped a US Billboard chart in each of seven decades in a row, from the 1960s through the 2020s, as Cher has. Nobody else holds both an acting Oscar and a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame either. Constant reinvention has kept her there.
She was born Cheryl Sarkisian in El Centro, California, in 1946, to an often absent Armenian-American father and a mother who worked as a model and actress. Money was tight, and she remembered holding her shoes together with rubber bands. Her voice was unusually low even at nine, and as a girl she idolized Audrey Hepburn while feeling there were no dark-haired heroines for her to identify with. She left school at 16 and danced in clubs on the Sunset Strip, and later discovered she had dyslexia.
In 1962 she met Sonny Bono, who was working for the producer Phil Spector, and sang backing vocals on hits such as the Ronettes' Be My Baby. Her first single, released under the name Bonnie Jo Mason, flopped partly because radio programmers mistook her deep contralto for a man's voice. Stage fright led her to perform with Sonny, and as Sonny & Cher they broke through in 1965 with I Got You Babe. Their CBS variety show in the 1970s drew more than 30 million viewers a week.
Film brought a second career. She was nominated for an Oscar for Silkwood, won the Cannes best actress prize for Mask in 1985, and took the Academy Award for Best Actress for Moonstruck. Then came rock ballads such as If I Could Turn Back Time, and, at 52, the dance album Believe. Its title song used Auto-Tune as a deliberate robotic vocal effect, soon nicknamed the Cher effect, and became the top song of 1999 in the US and the best-selling single by a woman in British history.
Her Farewell Tour from 2002 to 2005 earned $250 million, a record for a female artist at the time, and she has sold over 100 million records. Her story became the 2018 Broadway musical The Cher Show, and she is widely known as a gay icon and campaigner on HIV and AIDS.
Source: Cher
