Why'd Cher's movie career die?

And she's a brilliant actress, too. Award winning! She was awesome in all over those films.

I agree. All the ones I listed were good performances. She's even good in Chastity that awful movie Sonny directed her in years ago.

She won an oscar.

Her age and bad plastic surgery.

R4 is correct. Also, I got the impression she lost interest in being an actress.

She turned down some good roles in The War of the Roses and Thelma and Louise to tour and do those Turn Back Time videos showing her butt.

Sonny's hypothesis was that she had a short attention span and once she reached the top of the acting world she got bored with it. Then when she wanted back in they'd moved on.

Meryl should have got her the other role in Death Becomes Her.

I rewatched Moonstruck last week. What a great movie. Still holds up. And Cher was really wonderful. The camera loves her even when she’s playing frumpy.

The '90s were such a strange period for Cher. Her follow-up to Moonstruck was Mermaids, which is still popular but it didn't really sustain a movie career. I think she lost interest, then made the poor decision of doing those infomercials which didn't help her credibility.

She starred in and directed one of the segments of If These Walls Could Talk. She did a good job but like acting, she lost interest or got distracted.

She focused on music again and released some great music - It's a Man's World and, of course, Believe. I think the huge success of Believe and touring took away from. movies. By the time she started acting again, the plastic surgery was too much to take her seriously. She looks like a propped up corpse with good make-up in both Burlesque and Mamma Mia 2.

I figured she could make more money doing shows.

I think she had some sort of mental health issues in the late 80s.

I remember stories of how the year after she won the Oscar she was there to present Best Picture. She arrived late after the show had started to avoid the red carpet. Then she had some sort of stage fright anxiety attack when she was about to go on. They went into the audience and got Jack Nicholson to came backstage and either go out with her or instead or her. She calmed down though and presented the Rain Man Oscar alone.

I've heard of other performers who spent years on stage suddenly getting stage fright too.

Olivier said he developed stage fright for the first time - in his 50s or 60s I think.

She was candid about it. She found filmmaking was tiresome, and tiring, and as an artist, she had little control. She quit basically, and went back to music where it was her work and her artistic control. But I agree she's fabulous as an actress in the few films she did.

Yeah Vanessa Redgrave developed it midway through her run in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. She opened the show and got through all that then suddenly was getting panic attacks.

Streisand of course is another example. Cherry Jones too.

Allison Janney had it during the revival of Six Degrees of Separation even though she is on a sitcom that shoots before a live audience. (She may have realized how bad that production was and how wrong she was for the role.)

She's no ME !!

She has said that basically once she won and Oscar she felt she had nothing left to prove and the roles she was getting offered were shit. Her last really decent movie was Tea With Mussolini. As others have said, she didn't actually enjoy the process of film making and of acting. She had a reputation for being difficult and not getting on well with directors. I think she found that music gave her the control she craved.

M avoided sharing screentime with Cher.

Yes she fought with Frank Oz on Mermaids and had him replaced with Richard Benjamin (or vice versa I forget)

She's a bit tentative in Tea with Mussolini. She'd kind of lost her confidence.

Someone on here always insists she was about to star in the Canadian cast of Sunset Boulevard but pulled out at the last minute due to nerves I guess. (Diahnn Carroll got the part.)

I love Tea With Mussolini but Cher came off as way too contemporary for a period piece. Shame she never returned to the theatre. She would have made a fantastic Mame.

R10 Cher always had stage fright. Sonny & Cher got to be a duo from Sonny having to accompany her onstage to give her courage.

She's said it herself: She did those infomercials for the Lori Davis haircare line in the '90s as a favor for a friend, and the movie offers stopped coming.

(They were going to stop regardless because of her age; this just hastened it.)

Those infomercials played everywhere INCESSANTLY for years. I remember seeing them at the time and thinking, WTF? This woman just won an Oscar, why is she on infomercials shilling shampoo?

I admit I liked her aerobics videos.

just remembered she's dyslexic and has trouble with reading. There's your answer. An A list actor is as good as the scripts they take the time to read. She didn't like to read, so she wasn't really informed as to what was out there and that means she wasn't using her juice to get movies made, push her way into roles, audition for directors who didn't want her for parts, etc.

Plus, she totally embraced the agency bullshit. Meaning, taking forever to make up her mind or even read a script, playing footsie with projects (being interested but then allowing contracts to get bogged down for months). And agencies wont push actors to audition or push them to read scripts for roles they can't deliver for the client. And she doesn't read. So you're just left with big offers. And those were few and far between for any actress in her 40s

You could almost say that her career went down the shitter, n'est pas?

[quote]And those were few and far between for any actress in her 40s

I think you mean "most" actresses in her 40s. One decade four nominations for me.

She should've had more songs in Burlesque than that gimmicky sounding has been Christina Aguilera. Her role in Mama Mia 2 was an extended cameo towards the end which was odd because Donna implies that her mother is dead in the previous film.

[Quote] infomercials for the Lori Davis haircare line in the '90s as a favor for a friend

I like her even more.

She developed a severe case of Epstein-Bar Syndrome . She was pretty much bed or couch bound at a time when she should've been capitalizing on her acting success.

She gave various reasons for a long disappearance but she was getting a lot of work done. And then she came back with "Believe". Does the time frame match r27?

She did that terrible movie with Ryan O'Neal and Chazz Palminteri in the mid-90s. It was basically a 3-person play so maybe she thought it would be a chance to show off some dramatic chops but audiences weren't interested in seeing a dowdy, suicidal Cher tied to a chair.

So how long after Moonstruck did Believe come out?

I loved her in Silkwood. In that film, when she was able to convincingly play a lesbian, I knew she was a much better actress than anyone could have imagined back in "The Beat Goes On" days.

Moonstruck came out in 1987 and Believe was released in in 1998. Can you manage that math, r30?

R29 thank you I never heard of that. Chazz Palminteri was sexy. Cher's wig is poorly cast and distracting in it's role as supporting hair statement.

R26, she was open about the fact she did the original infomercial as a favor and had serious misgivings about how it would affect her career, but then she made such an enormous amount of money from it, she did more of them.

It made me like her more as a person, too, because her friend was an overweight hairdresser many performers would have considered to be hired staff, certainly not a friend.

R27: Epstein-Barr was the disease of that era (90s). What hypocglycemia was in the 70s.

Chronic Fatigue (EBV) was in the 80s zeitgeist.

R36 , Thanks Dorothy .

[bold] R17 Yes she fought with Frank Oz on Mermaids and had him replaced with Richard Benjamin (or vice versa I forget) [/bold]

She didn’t get along with Peter Bogdanovich , either.

———

[quote]Q: So who was the most difficult actor you’ve ever worked with?

[quote]A: Cher.

[quote] Q: Tell me about your experience with her on Mask.

[quote] A: Well, she didn’t trust anybody, particularly men. She doesn’t like men. That’s why she’s named Cher: She dropped her father’s name. Sarkisian, it is. She can’t act. She won Best Actress at Cannes because I shot her very well. And she can’t sustain a scene. She couldn’t do what Tatum [O’Neal] did in Paper Moon. She’d start off in the right direction, but she’d go off wrong somehow, very quickly. So I shot a lot of close-ups of her because she’s very good in close-ups. Her eyes have the sadness of the world. You get to know her, you find out it’s self-pity, but still, it translates well in movies. Roger Ebert loved Mask and Cher’s performance, writing, “Cher makes Rusty Dennis into one of the most interesting movie characters in a long time.” I shot more close-ups of her than I think in any picture I ever made... She was always looking like someone was cheating her. I came to the set one day; I said, “You depress me, you’re always so down and acting like somebody’s stealing from you or something.” But finally, after about seven weeks of this, we started getting to like each other. She said, you know, we don’t watch out, we might end up liking each other. I said that would be amazing. And we did end up liking each other, and then when I sued the studio, she sided with the studio, of course. That was that.

Singer, actress, infomercial shill etc. The woman's got "it" she is still here and we are talking about her.

I admire her very much. I've liked her in every movie that I've seen that she's been in (I think).

I'm surprised her agent and manager didn't warn her about doing a tacky infomercial and how it would hurt her brand. That's their job.

When she did her one broadway show COME BACK TO YHE FIVE AND DIME.... she missed performances and the show closed.

She started to go nuts with plastic surgery. She would never have had a Judi Dench movie career. And there's no kind of movie career for Granny Barbarellas. Ask Jane Fonda.

I know Cher hates BURLESQUE but I think it’s fun and Stanley Tucci gets to give his Devil Wears Prada performance again.

Stanley Tucci plays gay better than gays do.

R6 She also turned down the role of Morticia in The Addams Family movies, which was stupid because she would’ve been perfect for that both in terms of looks and her dry personality.

It amazes me how she was willing to do an infomercial, yet turned down some amazing movie roles.

She would not have been better than Anjelica Huston.

r45 An informercial shoots in one day. A movie is up to a six month commitment (filming, reshoots, worldwide publicity tour/festival appearances). And the informercial pays more.

The idea that the infomercial hurt her career is insane. Its conventional wisdom and maybe even Cher believes it, but it was less than a decade later that actors dropped the wall regarding commercial television ad work where you had people like Catherine Zeta Jones and SJP making $10-50 million off a few days work and that continues now to this day. I understand it was seen as "has been" work by Hollywood at the time but a lot of those rules went away once CAA changed their motto to "keep the client working". And it wasn't that she wasn't offered The Addams family because she did an infomercial a few years before--she turned that and some other hits down. She just didn't really want to make movies.

She sang with Beavis & Butthead.

There isn’t much demand for actresses with 3 lips.

She wanted to expand into infomercials doing plugs for Lori Davis hair care.

r47 there's a BIG difference between doing commercials and doing infomercials. Infomercials are tacky.

[quote]R45 It amazes me how she was willing to do an infomercial, yet turned down some amazing movie roles.

Well, she’s super rich, right? That gives one the opportunity to only work when it suits them.

So, whatever.

[quote]The idea that the infomercial hurt her career is insane. Its conventional wisdom and maybe even Cher believes it, but it was less than a decade later that actors dropped the wall regarding commercial television ad work where you had people like Catherine Zeta Jones and SJP making $10-50 million off a few days work and that continues now to this day.

There's a difference between commericals and informercials though. Cher did several commercials at her movie star peak, hawking her perfume and Jack LaLanne among others.

The informercial was a different breed though. When those Lori Davis shows aired, the informercial was just starting to come into its own and was attracting a lot of attention. Ones like Amazing Discoveries and Susan Powter became fodder for pop culture. They were amusing low budget oddities. Therefore it was surprising when someone like Cher who had just won an oscar and considered an A list star not even five years prior showed up doing one. Dionne Warwick was another one who got ridiculed for her informercials as well during this period.. It was considered beneath their level for stars like them to be doing them in the early 90's.

Yes, infomercials were seen as very low-rent.

[quote]She sang with Beavis & Butthead.

I can’t believe I forgot about this.

As much as I like her, La Toya Jackson's Psychic Friends Network infomercials were actually laughable.

Yeah, Cher got a lot of flack for the infomercials and fitness videos.

I remember Keli Roberts, who was the instructor in her fitness videos, basically said that Cher was lazy.

I think Cher had a lot issues in the '90s - health and personal. Sonny dying was another tragedy she had to deal with.

But the decade ended on a high note with her massive comeback with Believe.

It is a bit disappointing though that Cher put so much work into her film career in the '80s, won the Oscar, and it was basically over.

She had a good run. RIP movie career of Cher.

"Wagon . . .Wheel. . .Watoosie," from "Burlesque" is my favorite line of Cher dialogue.

I'd be tentative too if I had to act opposite Joan Plowright, Judi Dench and Maggie Smith.

It went into the shitter

Nobody is crying over Cher's abandonment of a movie career, least of all Cher. She got even bigger! Pretty much a lifelong star! And most people like her.

A lowest common denominator star, though. Is she releasing another album of ABBA covers?

Yes she is for popular taste. But so what.

Well, I for one WANT a Volume 2 of "Cher sings the songs of ABBA", mmmkay???

Cher Sings the Nana Mouskouri Songbook, coming June, 2021

Nobody can sing like Nana Mouskouri! She is Greece's National Treasure!

Why are you missing Cher? You have Chaz Bono to look forward to in a upcoming American Horror Story.

She had great chemistry with M in Silkwood and Eric Stoltz in Mask.. but not so much with her romantic leading men.

that show got awful after Jess left r68

Cher always seems like Cher in any role.

I thought Cher had great chemistry with Jack Nicholson, Dennis Quaid, Bob Hoskins, but especially Nicholas Cage.

Cher had a Goth catalog in the early 90s called Sanctuary. It was awful.. She also did a bunch of health club commercials.

Cher was also in infomercials with a lady named Lori, selling hair care products.

Yes we know r74. Did you read any of the thread at all?

She used to sing with Sonny Bono. They were a duet act.

How did Cher ever get that part in Silkwood? Mike Nichols, Meryl in her prime.

Kurt Russell was probably a surprising choice for the film too. Don't think he had done much serious drama prior.

I think Kurt was coming off high profile roles in The Thing and Escape form New York plus playing Elvis Presley.

Hadn't Cher done "... Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean" for Altman?

Yes r79. I wonder how she got that role too then.

Cher was in the Broadway production of Jimmy Dean .

How were her reviews on Broadway? I know the show didn't last long. The movie actually got some acclaim and she got a Golden Globe nomination.

Didn't Cher have David Geffen in her corner?

Lily Tomlin really wanted the role in Silkwood.

I don't understand why people are surprised Cher got these roles. She was globally famous - worth a few ticket sales - and she was actually pretty good at acting (or being herself, which is compelling, an acting style in itself, if you've got the personality and charisma for it and she does)

[Quote] I don't understand why people are surprised Cher got these roles.

Showbiz was way more segregated back then. To some people, Cher was a joke, on par with Joey Heartherton. Can you imagine Joey in "Silkwood"?