麻豆约拍

What do you think of when you think of Cher? Singer. Fashion maverick. Queer icon. Meme queen. Punchline. How about Oscar-winning actor?

In a special for International Women's Month, Anna Bogutskaya celebrates an all-time talent of stage and screen: Cher, the ultimate multi-hyphenate. Cher is one of the very few people who has made her name into an instantly recognisable brand. And, by the time she decided to act, she had been in the limelight for twenty years.

She had risen to prominence as one half of the iconic pop duo Sonny & Cher. After their split, she hosted a comedy show, a talk show, had 33 singles in the charts as a solo artist, and broke every single rule in the fashion rule book through her style partnership with designer Bob Mackie. But when she decided that she wanted to be taken seriously as an actress, she was laughed at.

Aged forty at the time of her career shift, Cher鈥檚 screen career is a battle for authenticity - and to prove herself, she worked with the greatest. Her first serious role was in Robert Altman鈥檚 ensemble drama Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, about an all-female James Dean fanclub, in a role that she also played on Broadway. Cher plays the hot-headed Sissy, she goes from sassy, upbeat swagger to vulnerable openness about Sissy's double mastectomy with seemingly no effort at all. But it was Mike Nichols鈥� drama Silkwood, that really started shifting the narrative. Cher plays a key supporting role to Meryl Streep鈥檚 title character, a whistleblower and union activist. In Mask, she plays the mother of a teenage boy with 鈥渓ionitis鈥�, which won her the Cannes Film Festival award for Best Actress - slowly, she was winning over the critics. But with Moonstruck, she finally won over the Academy Awards, winning her first Oscar.

Today, any new Cher appearance becomes an event - and after almost sixty years in the spotlight, she鈥檚 more than earned it. Cher鈥檚 longevity in the entertainment industry can be boiled down to this: she obviously does the work, she just makes it look effortless.