‘We’re about to see a world collapse’: Cher pulls no punches
Despite seven decades of chart toppers, the pop queen still believes her success had a lot to do with good luck. Now, at 78, she’s using her voice as a war cry.
Cher loves Australians because they are ‘not very judgemental’.Credit: An Le/Now Open TV/Headpress
When the iconic pop queen Cher materialised in the middle of the crowd at the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras in March 2018, she mingled with the ease of a woman who was perfectly at home in the Emerald City. “I love that everybody is having such a good time and there’s no feeling of any kind of anger,” she said. “There’s no negativity and that’s what I like most.”
While she is not Australian herself – the 78-year-old living legend was born Cheryl Sarkisian in El Centro, California – Cher has a lot of Australians spinning in her orbit, including manager Roger Davies and co-manager Lindsay Scott, who greets me as I arrive at her Malibu home.
“You guys are not very judgmental,” Cher says of Australians. “I only think about fun when I think about Australia. In my mind’s eye, Australia is me and my entire group the first time we were there, running down the street and just having a blast and then going to this, can I call it drag club?”
We’re only a minute into our conversation, and we’ve hit our first bump. “What do you call it now?” Cher asks me. A drag club, I reply. But to be honest, neither of us is quite sure. “I never know when I’m about to be skewered,” Cher says, smiling.
We are sitting in Cher’s home, an ornate, Italianate palazzo of hammered travertine and hand-carved marble. When we met here more than a decade ago, to talk about her album Closer to the Truth, the Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Golden Globe winner was a woman with a lot on her mind.
That conversation was dominated by the emergence of female power in the world. As we sit back down in 2025, with Donald Trump at the centre of American politics, it does not feel like a woman’s world any more.
“I’m going to talk politics, and people don’t like talking politics, but I’m telling you, if you don’t get involved in politics in this country, you are f---ed, all right?” Cher says, pulling no punches. “We’re about to see a world collapse in front of our very eyes because everything Trump says he wants to do, he’s going to do and there’ll be a domino effect.
“Women don’t have freedom over their bodies, where they don’t even want to give them birth control pills, where you go to jail if you help a woman, even if she’s dying, you can’t help her. You have to wait until the woman’s almost dead.
At 78, Cher is using her platform to advocate for women’s rights in a fractured US.Credit: An Le/Now Open TV/Headpress
“It harks back to a day when we had no value whatsoever,” Cher says. “It’s unbelievable. It wasn’t that long ago where [a woman] had to have someone co-sign if they wanted to buy a house or have a bank account. Look where we’ve come from. We couldn’t vote. And it’s going back there. And if they have their way, [those rights] will be the first ones to go.”
The enduring power of Cher’s image – and sound – needs no explanation. She is that rare artist who has had Billboard number-one singles in seven consecutive decades, from the 1960s to the 2020s. Baby Boomers love her, as do Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z. Even Generation Alpha – those born between 2010 and today – is getting to know her music.
In the age of social media, one of its unexpected effects is the way in which it churns up clips from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s: Elvis, Cher with Tina Turner, Cher with the Jacksons, David Bowie… It’s a reminder that Cher comes from a formidable peer group and also that before she was the queen of pop, she was a TV star. And it’s a reminder that there is a powerful cultural lineage from the Rat Pack in the 1950s, through the era of Elvis, to Sonny and Cher in the 1960s and 1970s, to the Jacksons, to Michael Jackson and beyond.
It wasn’t that long ago where [a woman] had to have someone co-sign if they wanted to buy a house or have a bank account.
Cher, pop queen and actress
“This is the truth, it’s a lot of luck,” Cher says, candidly. “If you’re an artist, luck is a big deal. There are people a thousand times more talented than I am who are never going to see the light of day for some unknown reason.”
“Sonny and I failed,” Cher says of her early professional and marital partnership with Sonny Bono. (The duo were married between 1964 and 1975 and have one son, Chaz.) “Then we rose to The Sonny & Cher Show, then we got a divorce, then I had The Cher Show.
“After that I couldn’t make a record, couldn’t get on TV, couldn’t do anything, so I went to New York. I thought, ‘I’m not ready to get out of show business.’”
What happened next was the point on which her entire life pivots. Cher decided: “I always wanted to be an actress, so I’m going to try that.” Meanwhile, her mother, Georgia Holt, misdialled a number on her phone, thinking she was calling Cher, and instead called director Robert Altman, whose wife Catherine was a friend.
If I Could Turn Back Time, and its iconic music video, has become an anthem across generations. Credit: Getty Images
“He was taking a nap and he went, ‘Who is this?’ And my mum was saying, ‘Is Cher there?’ And he went, ‘What the f--- would Cher be doing here?’” She laughs. “And then my mum [realised, and said], ‘Oh my God, I got the numbers mixed up.’”
Altman, later realising Cher wanted to be an actor, sent her a script for Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982). That led to Silkwood, with Meryl Streep, in 1983. Those roles, plus Mask (1985), The Witches of Eastwick (1987) and Mermaids (1990), were instrumental in the transformation and resurgence of her career.
“I’ve had really bad luck, and I’ve had really good luck, but I’ve had more good luck than bad,” Cher says. “I don’t know if it’s predestined because there’s no real reason for me to be Cher, except I was running around my house in my underpants with a hairbrush singing into it when I was four.
“I’ve always been Cher. I just was small versions of myself. And then a version of me that was with Sonny for a time, and then I needed to be away from Sonny to become myself. It worked for a while, and then it stopped working and I was going backwards. But I just think I’ve been lucky.”
Presently, Cher is exploding on social media for something else: an Uber Eats commercial in which she plays herself. Originally intended to spearhead an Australian media campaign, it has unexpectedly gone viral around the world.
In it, Cher asks the deliver-(almost)-anything brand to send her back to the 1980s. A time machine is delivered and she is promptly transported to a filthy medieval paddock. “This isn’t the ’80s!” she exclaims. “It’s the 1680s,” replies a mud-covered peasant.
Cher finds herself unwittingly transported to the 1680s in a new ad for Uber Eats.Credit: Uber Eats
As for her original request: the 1980s? “Every once in a while, there’s a decade that gets to throw off its overcoat and just be crazy,” Cher says. “So [the 1980s] reminds me of Turn Back Time, when everybody’s like balls to the wall and we’re dancing all night and having fun.
“I don’t know if that’s what it really was, but that’s how I felt it,” she adds. “There was a great freedom. I’m sure people were suffering, but for me it seemed like ... I was getting older, but I was having so much fun I didn’t feel it. I had a lot of freedom and I still was kicking ass with both legs.”
The superstar has also taken on the herculean task of writing her life story. Not one to do anything by halves, it comes in two volumes. The first, Cher: The Memoir, was released in November, shot straight to No.1 on the New York Times′ best-seller list, and spans Cher’s life from her childhood to the peak of her TV career with Sonny Bono in the 1970s. The second book, covering her later life, is due out this year.
Writing the books, she says, has been a powerful lesson in honesty. “I had a really hard life,” she says. “It was great, but, boy, the beginning was not great and some parts of it were not great. I didn’t know how much I wanted to tell. And it’s really hard to tell things you don’t necessarily want people to know. You can’t tell every single thing because then you could never walk outside your door.”
Then, she says, she had something of an epiphany. “I realised, ‘Why am I writing a book when I’m not telling things I don’t want to tell?’ In the part where I was leaving Sonny, it was really hard to write it because I had to relive it. It made me really uncomfortable. And I had to remember the good parts of him so that I didn’t get sucked into the bad parts.”
So, Cher started over. “I rewrote it because I thought, ‘This is not who I’ve been my whole life.’ I haven’t hidden stuff, I’ve made mistakes in public. Not that I wanted to, but I’ve made mistakes and had to live with them and go, ‘Okay, fine, f--- you, I did this.’ But it’s hard. You don’t want to show yourself warts and all, but sometimes you just have to do it.”
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