Cher Biography

Cher met songwriter and producer Sonny Bono in 1963. She was 16, he was 28, and two years later, as Sonny and Cher, they recorded their first hit song, “I Got You Babe.”

They were an amusing physical combination: Cher tall and willowy, Sonny short and mustachioed, both clad in the psychedelic clothing of the Love Generation.

In 1967 they had another chart-topper with “The Beat Goes On.”

Their recording career seemed about to fade when they bounced back with a tongue-in-cheek television variety show: The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour was a hit from 1971 to 1974, when the couple split up and filed for divorce. (A revived post-divorce version of the show, The Sonny and Cher Show, ran from 1976-77.)

Meanwhile, Cher’s solo singing career took off, with hits including “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves” and “Half Breed.”

Then Cher turned to acting and earned praise for her work in Silkwood (1983, with Meryl Streep) and Mask (1985), and in 1988 she won the best actress Oscar as a lovelorn Brooklyn widow romanced by Nicolas Cage in the wry comedy Moonstruck.

In the 1990s she returned to music as an electro-pop diva, releasing the successful album Believe in 1999.

In later years her many “farewell” tours and cheerful embrace of plastic surgery made her the subject of good-natured ribbing in celebrity journals, but she has been unfazed. She began a three-year gig in Las Vegas in 2008, replacing Celine Dion at Caesar’s Palace.

Cher then went on to have two of her most successful solo releases, the albums Closer to the Truth (2013) and Dancing Queen (2018), giving her hit records in every decade since the 1960s.