@freshwaterbeach wrote:
I have always found her an interesting and talented actor.
Silkwood comes to mind, with Meryl Streep.
She won the Golden Globe for best supporting actress and nominated for an Academy Award for the same role.
I agree totally. Apart from Meryl Streep and perhaps Kathleen Turner, Cher had the most interesting and acclaimed movie career of any actress in the 1980's. It's an interesting evolution. In the early 80's she was being paid over $300,000 a week (in 80's money) to perform a cabaret show of covers in Vegas. However she realised her latest albums haven't been doing well so she decides to get into acting, her one original passion.
Nobody in Hollywood will give her a job and I don't blame them. The Cher of the early 80's was kind of a parody of the TV show Cher of the 70's. She was nearing forty, had a big nose, bad teeth, a rough edge personality who didn't seem to take her craft seriously. Add to this that from the mid 60's Hollywood movies were geared towards men. Apart from Barbara Streisand there was no really huge female superstar in movies of the 70's. Cher had the good fortune (although she wasn't to know) of wanting to act at the start of a decade which would show a great comeback for women's roles.
Her break into films was like a movie plot itself. Her mother, a model and actress on I Love Lucy, was best friends with the wife of director, Roger Corman. The day Cher quit her highly paid Vegas gig to go study acting with Lee Strasberg in New York City, her mother calls speed dial expecting to reach Cher, however apparently, she "accidentally" called Corman's house, waking him up out of a deep sleep. Mum asks to speak to Cher and he goes, "Why would Cher be here?" After the mix up is explaimed Corman asks what Cher is doing and her mum explains she's heading to New York to study acting, right at the time when Corman is casting his new Broadway play, "Come Back To the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean..." Well what a coincidence! Cher auditions for one of the leads, get it, proves a sensation and then when Corman produces the film, recreates it with the original theatrical cast.
The movie, more like a filmed play but extremely effective, is a great arthouse movie that takes place on one diner set. It stars Karen Black and Sandy Dennis among others. Really worth a look at if you like 80s nostalgia for the 50s. Despite producers urging Corman not to hire Cher for both the play and the film, she receives a Golden Globe nomination. While in the play, another legendary director, Mike Nichols sees Cher's performance and offers her a tiny role in his film, Silkwood, opposite the Queen of the movies, Merly Streep. He finds Cher so captivating, he broadens her role, and without makeup etc... she is almost unrecognizable and well deserving of her Academy Award nomination, even though she has less than twenty lines in the entire film.
When the trailer for the film was being released, Cher, her manager and her sister rushed down to a theatre. When the credits for the movie came on, the audience remained composed for Streep and Kurt Russell but the moment Cher's name came on the screen the audience began guffawing, cackling, whooping with laughter, throwing insults at the screen etc... As they continued to laugh, tears fell down Cher and co's faces... She says other theatre audiences all over the country had the same reaction, "But once they saw the film, they stopped laughing."
Her real breakthough as a movie star came with "Mask", the true story of a mother and a son who suffered from facial dyformity like elaphantitus. She had major disputes with Peter Bagdonovitch, the director who wanted her to soften the character of the mother but she insisted on playing her tough, the way the real mother was. The movie was a hit and she won Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival (The only woman to win an Oscar, Cannes Film, Emmy and Grammy award).
However in this performance she was overlooked by the Academy and came to the awards in an outrageous black Native American inspired headress, created by Bob Mackie. On stage, presenting, she commented, "As you see, I received my Academy booklet on how to dress as a serious actress...."
In 1987 she had three films planned in a row. In fact her schedule was so tight, she almost didn't do "Moonstruck" but managed to fit it in between the critically acclaimed "Suspect" and box office darling, "The Witches of Eastwick" which I didn't like. Even when I saw it at the cinemas I thought it was dated and today it simply is boring. But Moonstruck is a lovely film, not a film perhaps worthy of time-capsule consideration but as far as the romantic comedy genre goes, is one of the best. Cher is entirely convincing as an Italian and the rest of the cast are first rate. Norman Jewisham(sp?), another first rate director, led her to an Oscar win in a very competetive year, opposite one time co star, Meryl Streep.
Her Oscar speech was one of the best and even Ben Affleck stole it, verbatim when he won the Directors Guild Award recently - I'm surprised so few picked up on that. Anyway, Cher's dress was beautiful and she looked like a stunning, firmly established movie star that she was.This really was the end of the line for her although few would have thought so at the time.
The next year she released the single "If I could turn back time" which made her an icon and then the world tour on the back of a smash album. However her musical success was to the sacrifice of her movie career. She turned down the lead roles in "War of the Roses", "Thelma and Louise" and "Sister Act" and before she knew it, three years had passed before she made another movie. Unfortunately, although Mermaids is a great film and has become somewhat of a cult classic, it's only modest profit after such a long time between Cher drinks, really dampened her momentum and then when she agreed to do a TV informercial for a friend's product, that killed her movie career stone dead. It's such a shame as now celebrities all do informercials - even a decade before Jane Fonda had released exercise tapes but perhaps the difference is they were successful and Cher's informercial products didn't sell well at all.
It was over...
It didn't help that she developed a sickness; a bi product of the herpes virus that left her very tired and apathetic at a time when she really needed the vitality to resurrect her career.
One can also blame plastic surgery however she looked pretty youthful and natural well into the 2000's. Her cameo in "Stuck on You" showed her looking great. I think it was around 2005/6 that she started looking more frozen but if she had played her cards right, she could have continued her movie career much longer than she did. I can think of few actresses who over a decade, chose such great movies - not a dud between them and completely transformed herself in the process.
I find this evolution enormously inspiring and any time I've gone through a period when my life seems at a standstill or will never get better I think of the Cher of the early 80's and how by the end of the decade, she had won an Oscar, produced one of the biggest and best albums of her career and to top it off, dabbled with some great plastic surgery that left her more beautiful than before.
Sure, she never really topped the late 80's but it shows how people can turn their life around, but it has to come from oneself.
