Cher

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Cher&chld=H_100&junk=junk.png Cher Venus symbol.svg
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Cher in 2010
Birth name Cherilyn Sarkisian
Birthplace El Centro
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Birth date 20 May 1946
Resides in Los Angeles
Profession Singer, Actress
Languages English
Ethnicities Armenian, American
Awards Academy Award, Grammy Award, Emmy Award, Golden Globe, Cannes Film Festival
Spouses Sonny Bono
Children Chaz Bono
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http://www.cher.com

Cher born Cherilyn Sarkisian on May 20, 1946 is a world-famous actress and singer.

Cher became famous as one of the pop music duo Sonny and Cher with her first husband, Sonny Bono. Together, they had a number one single called "I Got You Babe" (1965) in both the U.K. and The U.S.A. After their career stalled (their bubble-gum pop was not popular in an era of edgier tunes), CBS head of programming Fred Silverman gave the duo their own show, The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour, in 1971. It was a surprise hit and ran for four seasons before the duo decided to end its run; Cher announced her intent to separate from Sonny. She later hosted and performed in her own variety TV series, which ran for two seasons and concluded in 1977.

During the early Seventies, Cher began to establish herself as a solo recording artist with producer Snuff Garrett, and she scored three U.S. #1 hits with the songs Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves (1971), Half-Breed (1973), and Dark Lady (1974). Cher and Bono divorced in 1974, and she later married rock musician Gregg Allman, a member of the Allman Brothers Band. She has two children, Chastity Bono and Elijah Blue Allman. Cher and Allman divorced in 1979 and she later had a relationship with guitarist Les Dudek.

Cher had demonstrated her considerable comedic talents in the various skits she performed on The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour, and while she was highly regarded in this arena, her ambition to develop a movie career was at first not taken seriously. For several years she worked at trying to secure a role to prove herself, until she was cast in a stage production of Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. The reviews she received were glowing and she was cast in the film version, directed by Robert Altman. Once again the critics praised her work and she was nominated for a Golden Globe Award.

This finally allowed her to make the transition into a successful acting career, starring in films including Silkwood (nomination for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, Mask (for which she won the Cannes Film Festival Best Actress Award in 1985), Suspect, Moonstruck (for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1988), Mermaids and Tea With Mussolini. In 1989 she scored another million-selling #1 hit with the song If I Could Turn Back Time.

Following the devastating earthquake that hit Armenia in December of 1988, Cher travelled to the country to participate in the relief activities. Cher is of Armenian descent.

Her ability to reinvent herself has allowed her to continue performing and creating successful recordings for more than 35 years. One exception was her alternative-rock album entitled Not.Commercial (pronounced "not-dot-com-mercial"). The album was written after a retreat to a poetry class in France; it was rejected by record labels and Cher chose to sell it on her Web site, with limited success.

In 1998 she had one of the biggest successes of her recording career with the number one hit Believe and the million selling album of the same name which won her a Grammy Award. With the success of Believe, Cher became the oldest woman in the rock era to have a Number One hit. In the United Kingdom, "Believe" stayed at No. 1 in the charts for seven weeks and is the all-time biggest-selling single by a solo female artist.

In 2004 she was nominated for a Grammy for "Best Dance Recording" for her song "Love One Another" but she lost to Australian Kylie Minogue. In the same year, she was told that for health reasons she would no longer be able to perform live. She therefore embarked on her last-ever world-wide tour (the Farewell Tour), her most spectacular and best-received tour ever. However, while this tour may be her last, it shows no signs of terminating in the near future; it has included over 200 shows and continues to add new venues.

Among her many achievements, Cher is the only recording artist in history to score #1 hits in four successive decades and she also holds the Billboard record for the longest time span --34 years-- between her first #1 hit in 1965 and her most recent #1 in 1999.

Cher is managed by expatriate Australian impresario Roger Davies. The former manager of successful '70s Australian pop band Sherbet, Davies' company also manages Tina Turner, Sade, Pink, Joe Cocker and Tony Joe White.

Cher's trip to Armenia

Title: UP FRONT: IN A BROKEN LAND Her life as a star on hold, a somber Cher goes to the aid of her troubled ancestral homeland, Armenia
Date: 05/17/1993
Publication: People
Author: Reported by SUSAN CHEEVER

I DON'T KNOW WHY I CAME HERE, says Cher. It is a late April afternoon, and she is standing before a group of 1,000 students at Yerevan University, deep in the ravaged heart of the former Soviet republic of Armenia. No one in the unheated, dank assembly hall seems to know why she is there either. They remember Cher from the not so long ago days when they had television and batteries and something other than candles by which to read the newspapers at night. And so to them she is an intriguing apparition, a sudden shaft of light slanting in from the West, even if her message is not full of hope.

Most Americans have no idea you are here, she tells them, in her characteristic let's-cut-the-b.s. fashion. Now, suddenly, she seems to grasp her mission. The most important thing I can do, she continues, is take a picture back to America so they can see what it's like.

For three days, Cher, 46, traveled through Armenia, collecting -- and generating -- such images of a country and a people who have fallen through the crack of consciousness between Bosnia and Somalia.

She arrived in Yerevan -- once a prosperous capital city and now a ragged shadow of its former self -- on a sunny, 50 degreesF Wednesday. She had departed her home in Santa Monica several days earlier, paid a visit to her 17-year-old son, Elijah Blue Allman, at his New England prep school, stopped briefly in London, then flown to Armenia under the auspices of the United Armenian Fund, a nonprofit relief organization, on a rickety DC-8 cargo plane. With her came 45 tons of medical supplies, books, printing equipment, candy and toys -- including Glitter Beach Barbie dolls. Then, at the airport, she and her companions -- including her old pal and assistant Paulette Betts and true love turned best friend Rob Camilletti, 28 -- boarded an ancient bus crammed with an international group of reporters and photographers who had vied for the chance to join her. I want to bring a face to the name Armenian, she had said. Her itinerary included an orphanage, a typical Armenian household and -- because she is, after all, Cher -- a brief stop for Diet Pepsi with the president of the country, Levon Ter-Petrosyan.

To understand why Cher undertook this journey, it helps to remember that behind the leather and lace costumes and the club-scene poses, she is still Cherilyn Sarkisian, the only black-haired member in a family of Southern California blonds. Cher, who grew up with one half sister, is the daughter of a mother, Georgia, with Irish, English, German and Cherokee bloodlines, and a father, John, whose parents left Armenia after an ethnic-cleansing campaign conducted by the Ottoman Turks in which an estimated 1 million perished. Her parents divorced when Cher was 14 months old, and she enjoyed meaningful contact with her father for only a few months when she was 11 and Georgia and John briefly reconciled. Although her relationship with her father, who died in 1985, was volatile, and the two seldom spoke, Cher will always remember that first sight of his dark eyes. I just looked at him, she recalls. Until then, I didn't know there was such a thing as an Armenian.

In 1993 there is barely such a place as Armenia. The country of 3.7 million -- shattered by a 1988 earthquake, economically ruined by the disintegration of the Soviet Union and locked in an unwinnable war with neighboring Azerbaijan, which has blockaded most of its borders -- is so staggeringly dysfunctional that it could rouse maternal instincts in a stone. Unemployment brushes 85 percent in the cities, electrical power is sporadic, and a pound of beef costs 1,000 rubles -- for most people, two week's pay. Scattered along the route that Cher's bus traveled were the weirdly uniform stumps of trees that had been cut down for firewood during the long winter.

So why plunk herself down amid the misery? Cher says that at this point in her life she actually feels herself drawn to such grinding need and utter turmoil. One reason is that her family responsibilities are lighter these days. Elijah (her son by second husband Gregg Allman) is off at private school. And her daughter (by first husband Sonny Bono), Chastity, 24, is pursuing a rock career with a band called Ceremony. I was living a life of seclusion -- and it wasn't working, Cher says. Later she adds, If you want to represent people as an artist, you've got to live your life with your ear to the ground, to be disturbed and restless.

During the last few months, Cher has been shaking up her world. She has put all of her real estate holdings -- a house and 1.3-acre spread in Malibu, and another house on 7-plus acres in Aspen -- on the market. She has stepped up her contributions of time and money to the Children's Craniofacial Association, a group she learned about while making the 1985 movie Mask, in ( which she played the mother of a teenage boy with a severe facial deformity. And though she hasn't made any definite plans to pull out of the infotainment business, her days of huckstering hair and skin products on late-night TV appear to be numbered.

I think I kind of lost my way, she said one night in Armenia, speaking from the darkness of a hotel room that would have to wait another day for its allotted hour or so of daily electricity. I've sold my soul in a way. What I've done is nothing to be ashamed of, but I just don't want to be a businesswoman who does infomercials anymore. It doesn't feel good.

It's strange what does. During her brief but emotionally charged tour of Armenia, Cher did her makeup by the light of a sputtering candle, hid her unwashed bangs under a velvet cap and a striped headscarf, huddled for warmth each night under ratty blankets -- then woke up refreshed and ready for more.

Each day in that land of poverty and chaos brought serendipitous surprises. For example, Cher probably never thought she would want to see the inside of an orphanage again. She had spent some six months in one when she was about 2 and her mother, a single parent, was too sick to take care of her. But Cher's visit to the warm but shabby Mangadoon home near Yerevan brought smiles instead of traumatic memories. Cher sat cross-legged on the floor in her leather overalls while two dozen children of preschool age recited the Lord's Prayer for her and sang the Armenian national anthem. She rewarded each child with a hug and a Barbie, a gift that left many of the Mangadoon residents, who had never had a new toy before, speechless. I always hated you, Barbie, Cher said to one of the dolls. I always thought you were a blond bimbo, but now I see that you have your uses.

The woman who headed the supposedly typical Armenian household that Cher visited on her second day in the country was anything but speechless. I hope this is the worst of times, Alvard Keropian, a woman in her mid-40s, said to her celebrity visitor. Ensconced on the sixth floor of a concrete apartment block atop a hill in Yerevan, Alvard and her husband are raising five children on a diet of little more than rice, potatoes and powdered milk. Against a backdrop of dozens of books -- which, along with brandy glasses, coffee cups and a few sticks of furniture, seem to be the family's only possessions -- she chatted with Cher, mom to mom, about the difficulties, and occasional joys, of having a teenager. My son is doing so well at mathematics, she said, that someday you, Cher, will be proud to say that you have met Vahan Keropian. The boy, standing nearby, emitted a strangled noise -- the international signal for adolescent embarrassment.

The next day, Cher visited another household a few miles away and encountered yet a deeper level of need. Christina Agabekov, who lives with her parents and year-old sister, has been partially paralyzed since birth from cerebral spastia. Although she is only 3, she knows who Cher is because her mother, Nelli, reached the movie star eight months ago with a letter that she had entrusted to a friend who was immigrating to the U.S. and who found an address for Cher through a charitable organization in New York City. What the mother wanted was help in getting Christina to America, where her condition could be better diagnosed and treated. It's a miracle that letter got to me, Cher says. But the family thinks it's an even bigger miracle that Cher not only wrote back, offering to bring Christina to the U.S., but showed up to sit in the parlor and confirm the arrangements. The child and her mother will be going to a hospital in Los Angeles some time this month. Unbelievable! said Christina's Aunt Irina, who traveled about 400 miles from Uzbekistan to be with the child and witness the celebrity visit. Yeah, said Cher, with her patented deadpan. This is kind of the Armenian version of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.

On her final day in the country, Cher took a short trip through Yerevan to pay a 30-minute call on President Ter-Petrosyan. They discussed a book Cher had read recently, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, about noble Armenians who fought the Turks. Then Cher went with her group to visit Echmiadzin, the headquarters of the Armenian Orthodox Church and Seminary built amid a peaceful setting of trees and gardens in the year A.D. 301. She took in the ancient archways and the painted and inlaid altar, then paused before a heavy jeweled crucifix as black-hooded priests chanted the morning Eucharist. After lingering over the tapestries, paintings and manuscripts in the seminary's museum, she wrote in the guest book that visiting this place has been one of the most thrilling moments of my life.

Outside, the sound of hammering drew her toward a cave in the ancient wall where a stonecutter was at work on an ornate cross made from the crumbly pink tufa that is Armenia's native stone. She clambered down into the cryptlike , space and asked for instruction. Guided by the stonecutter, Max Chazarian, she helped etch an elaborate chain design into the soft rock that will eventually be installed in front of the seminary.

As Cher hammered at the stone, intent on her work, pink tufa dust rained down on her black clothes. She couldn't have cared less. Malibu and Aspen seemed far, far away. I could have stayed there for days, she said later, shortly before getting on the plane to head home. I met a man, and he taught me to carve on stone. At that moment I began to feel Armenian.

Copyright 1993, People Magazine


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Armenian Genocide Tweet

Cher Urges Turkish Government to Recognize Armenian Genocide By MassisPost Updated: April 14, 2015

Armenian American singer and actress Cher (born Cherilyn Sarkisian) has urged the Turkish government to recognize the Armenian Genocide. The 68-year-old celebrity said that in a Twitter post.

“I don’t feel anger for (or blame) the people of Turkey for something that happened 100 year ago. But I think the [Turkish] Government should acknowledge Genocide,” she tweeted.

Cher also shared a “horror story” her grandmother told her. “The Turks came to the village, they called a town meeting and shot the men and boys and raped the women and girls,” she wrote in the post.

In March 2014, the singer joined the Save Kessab campaign to draw international attention to the plight of Christian Armenians in the Syrian town of Kessab.

http://massispost.com/2015/04/cher-urges-turkish-government-to-recognize-armenian-genocide/

Cher is proud to be Armenian

Exclusive interview to air on US-Armenia TV this week Published: Friday April 10, 2009 reporter.am

Burbank, Calif. - The year was 1993. Cher boarded "one of those big airplanes that has no seating," a DC-8 cargo ship, to Armenia. "It was such a rickety old plane and they had bolted these little seats in the back for us and given us a canister of oxygen." Because of the wartime power shortage, they had to get to Yerevan before dark, "and we hit the runway as the sun went down."

Cher recalls her trip to Armenia and discusses her Armenian heritage with Lusine Shahbazyan in an intimate and exclusive interview that will air for the first time this week on US-Armenia TV.

She's a superstar with more than four decades of staying power. She has sold more than 100 million albums and is an Oscar, Emmy, Grammy, and Golden Globe-winning performer. She has starred in movies and on television and has directed; she has been known for her tastes in fashion and men. Her life and her loves have been chronicled by media around the world, as Paul Chaderjian - who helped arrange the interview and participated in it - wrote in these pages in a Feb. 16, 2008, cover story.

The modern-day legend remembers entering a random coffee shop in Yerevan. "All the men were in there," she says. "Some of the men were playing chess, but they didn't have any coffee and they didn't have any tea. But they were just in there. They were playing their chess. They were talking. They were all dressed properly, maybe a little bit of tatters, but so dignified. And it was the first time I thought, I'm an Armenian, I'm proud."

Prompted by Lusine, Cher also speaks of her father, Garabed Sarkisian. He was an immigrant whose parents had survived the Armenian Genocide. He was a farmer, sometimes a truck driver, and a man Cher calls "charismatic, a little shady like a bad boy."

"I don't really look like anyone in my family, except my great grandmother and my father," says Cher, whose parents divorced when she was two. She didn't see her father again until she was 11. "When I was young, every once in a while, my mother would look at me with the strangest look on her face; and then when I saw my father, I realized why. Because we made the same faces, and I'd never seen him. And when I saw him, I realized why."

"I liked him a lot," she says, "but he'd been in prison." Sarma and kufta

After her parent's reunion, the family would often visit her father's relatives in Fresno. "All of my relatives were living there, in Fresno. A huge family, and my great grandmother never learned to speak English. My grandmother spoke English, but she called women ‘he.' She got [English] a little bit, but she didn't get it great. But they were great. They were really happy to see me, and my grandmother taught me how to make sarma, kufta, and all kinds of things. I really enjoy and love the food. Armenian food is brilliant."

The vibrant and ever-youthful Cher, 62, will appear at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas on April 25-26 and 28-29 and in the month of May. Bob Mackie has created more than a dozen new costumes and the 4,300-seat Colosseum has been fitted to provide state-of-the-art lighting and special effects to complement Cher's chart-topping hits.

External links

Information comes from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cher_(singer)

Facts about "Cher"
AwardsAcademy Award +, Grammy Award +, Emmy Award +, Golden Globe + and Cannes Film Festival +
Birth dateMay 20, 1946 +
Birth day20 +
Birth monthMay +
Birth year1,946 +
Birthplace coordinates32° 47' 31", -115° 33' 47"Latitude: 32.792
Longitude: -115.5630514
+
Birthplace nameEl Centro +
ChildrenChaz Bono +
EthnicitiesArmenian + and American +
LanguagesEnglish +
Person nameCher +
ProfessionSinger + and Actress +
ResidenceLos Angeles +
SpousesSonny Bono +