LOS ANGELES -- Burlesque, her first starring role in a decade, looms. And I'm compelled to ask Cher how an actress with an Oscar and an Oscar nomination goes so many years without a movie.
"I forgot," she says with a laugh.
No, it's not evasiveness. Cher seems incapable of it.
"It's not always a fantastic quality," she says of her openness. "My press agent hates it, Sonny (the late Sonny Bono of Sonny & Cher, for those of you under 40) always hated that about me. I just say stuff."
Yes, she insists, her film career simply slipped her mind. "I just forgot that I could do movies. Nothing came to me that I liked, except a part in Mamma Mia, which I was on the road (at the time) and couldn't do.
"But I have been busy. It's not that I've been a shut-in, but I forgot that I really enjoyed this. I forgot I liked acting so much. You don't do it and you kind of forget."
Busy, in her case, has mainly consisted of a $60-million-a-year contract at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas, where she revisits her entire career at each performance, dressed in each wardrobe change as conservatively as a Mayan Goddess. I'm not the sort who asks, "Who are you wearing?" Suffice to say the fetching designer top and jeans she wears for an interview is a far cry from the in-your-face Bob Mackie outfit with a headdress boasting actual feathers from Quetzalcoatl (I'm guessing here) that she'll be wearing the next night for an audience of Vegas tourists.
And then there's the music, from I Got You Babe in the '60s, to Believe and Song For The Lonely in the '00s, she has achieved the seemingly impossible task of scoring at least one No. 1 hit in every decade since the '60s.
A gay icon, Cher was a natural first-choice for her role in Burlesque (in theatres Wednesday). The movie, which has been described to her as "a gay Fantasia," (although gay Wizard of Oz seems more like it), co-stars Christina Aguilera as a small-town girl who dumps her job as a waitress and buses it to L.A., where she encounters a club apparently from another planet.
There, young burlesque dancers lip-synch to old show tunes, while the actual singing is done by Tess (Cher), the proprietress of the place. For Cher it's about as seamless a move from big-time Vegas cheese to the big-screen as can be imagined.
Ah, but disaster looms. Despite the efforts of Sean, her gay best friend and costume designer (Stanley Tucci), Tess' ex-husband (Peter Gallagher) is intent on selling the place to a heartless realtor (Eric Dane, aka Grey's Anatomy's McSteamy).
Redemption appears in the form of Aguilera's Ali, who convinces her new mentor that other people can sing too, and that maybe this lip-synching thing can be rethought.
The implied passing of the torch is literal in some ways. Aguilera (who has quipped that she'd "drink Cher's bathwater") admits that her earlier, sexually provocative career choices were informed by Cher. She admits, for example, that the "ass-less chaps" she wore in the then-scandalous 2002 video Dirty were inspired by Cher's similarly revealing outfit in the video for If I Could Turn Back Time.
Asked if she sees her onstage sexuality reflected back to her in today's performers, Cher says "sometimes. But if you do one thing, as time goes on other people get away with so much more. "But somebody has to start it. And there were people doing it before I did -- mostly in movies, not necessarily in rock 'n' roll where everybody was pretty clothed when I started out. I just thought it was fun (to be provocative), and I looked cute naked," she says with a proud grin bursting through her artificially bee-stung lips (she's frank, in a couldn't-care-less way, about her surgically sculpted body too).
It seems appropriate for Cher to be playing someone facing foreclosure, her life and troubles being an open book -- from her divorce from Sonny at the end of their reign as the king and queen of '70s variety TV (she reportedly came out of the marriage effectively broke) to the mockery that first greeted her forays into film (she still tears up at a memory of seeing a trailer for Silkwood in a theatre and hearing an entire audience laugh at the mention of her name) to the problematic lives of her children (daughter Chastity underwent gender reassignment surgery and now goes by the name Chaz, while Elijah, her son with rocker Gregg Allman, has battled drug addiction).
She has emerged from it all, rich and poor ("and rich is better," she says, almost as a mantra). "I don't believe the word no," she says. "I just did this thing for the Glamour Awards and I said, 'No is a bulls--t word that someone made up, and I don't believe it. I just don't believe it because it's an easy out. Oh, they said, 'No,' to me. Oh well."
As her wardrobe implies, there's an onstage Cher and an at-home Cher. And Dane, who has known Cher since his teens, being a close friend of Elijah, has seen them both.
"She's a cool mother, a tremendous mother," he says. "It's kind of funny seeing Cher be a mom, but I saw some of the disciplinarian stuff go down. Elijah and I were always getting into trouble. I'd be (at their place) in Malibu and we'd screw around and Elijah would f--- up some way -- I don't want to go into details. And Cher would be yelling at him from downstairs.
"It was kind of cool to work with her as a peer," he says. "At first it was a little strange for her to see me in this context, like she'd look around to see if Elijah was there. But we got on great, I can't say enough about her."
Getting along with other actors, Cher says, is key. "I've worked with directors that I did not like, but I haven't worked with actors that I hated. I was thinking about, like, Debra Winger and Richard Gere (in An Officer and A Gentleman). He hated her. And I don't know if I would have been able to do that."
Case in point, her relationship with her onscreen soulmate Tucci. "We had a read-through, it was a disaster. And we became kind of friends by texting what a disaster it was, and got some alchemy going. It would have been horrible if we hadn't, because I really, really rely on other actors. Maybe too much."
Cher through the years:
1960s Cher -- Cherilyn Sarkisian Le Piere, 16, leaves her home in the Valley, takes acting lessons and makes fast friends (including Warren Beatty). She soon falls under the thrall of a young songwriter and Phil Spector employee named Sonny Bono. Sonny & Cher would place 11 singles on the Billboard Top 40 before the end of the decade.
1970s Cher -- They starred in the Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour from 1971 until 1974 (when their marriage ended). Cher also began recording hits solo, including Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves, Half Breed and Dark Lady. In 1975, she married rocker Gregg Allman of The Allman Brothers Band, with whom she had son Elijah Blue. The marriage lasted two years.
1980s Cher -- An actress is born. Robert casts her in his adaptation of the play Come Back To The Five And Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. She receives a supporting-actress Oscar for her best-friend role opposite Meryl Streep in Silkwood (a role Cher even now dismisses as "comic relief). She wins an Oscar for her starring role in Norman Jewison's Moonstruck, overshadowing the film on awards night with her legendary costume. Hits continue, (I Found Someone, If I Could Turn Back Time, Just Like Jesse James). In 1987, she and Sonny had an impromptu reunion on Late Night with David Letterman, singing I Got You Babe for the last time.
1990s Cher -- More movies (Mermaids, the HBO film If These Walls Could Talk, Franco Zefferelli's Tea With Mussolini) and the album Love Hurts, which sold 10 million copies. Boyfriends included twentysomething "bagel baker" Rob Camilletti and Bon Jovi guitarist Richie Sambora
2000s Cher -- Decade begins with a worldwide Do You Believe tour. In 2002, she embarks on Living Proof: The Farewell Tour, which after three years comes to be known as the Never Can Say Goodbye Tour. An NBC special based on the tour draws 18 million viewers. Vegas beckons. She is currently recording an album to be released in 2011.
-- Jim Slotek
