Monday Minute
No. 92 | May 10, 2010

Act Naturally

Well, I’ll bet you I’m gonna be a big star
Might win an Oscar you can never tell
The movies gonna make me a big star
‘Cause I can play the part so well

What’s it take to be a big movie star?  If you believe the song, all you gotta do is “act naturally.”  I’d guess it may involve a bit more than that, but this week’s theme—keeping it musical, once again—is singers who became actors and did it with remarkable success.  Over the years there have been precisely 87,234 actors who were once singers of one rank or another.  But only the slimmest fraction of them qualify for this select group:  people who were first and foremost singers, big names of the music scene, who not only went on to become movie stars too but also won Oscars for their work.

Our theme this week
Oscar-winning singers-turned-actors

Cher

Many years ago—some time between the invention of the wheel and the invention of the internet—I watched Sonny and Cher on a TV show talking about their stardom in the music world.  (It may have been The Mike Douglas Show.  The late-night shows were probably past my bedtime back then.)  As I remember it, one of them made the comment that the two of them were considered very hip by people who were square—but by people who were hip, Sonny and Cher were considered square.

That seemed true then, and though the hip/square distinction doesn’t matter today as it did in the ’60s (we divide the world in other ways now), when looking at Cher’s musical career, there’s still some truth to it.  She gets—and deserves—credit for her longevity as a hit maker and her engaging personality, but her music doesn’t have the same cachet as others’ from over the years. 

In contrast, Cher’s film career has been relatively brief but filled with performances earning critical acclaim.   In 1982 she reprised the stage role of Sissy in Robert Altman’s Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean.  Her performance won a Golden Globe nomination and a new appreciation from fans and people in the film business.  A Golden Globe win and an Oscar nomination followed, for playing the lesbian roommate in Silkwood, opposite Meryl Streep in the title role.  She starred in Mask (1985), winning Best Actress at Cannes, as the freewheeling mother of a disfigured son.  She was one of the three witches in The Witches of Eastwick, in 1987.  The same year she won the Oscar for Best Actress in the hit Moonstruck, a funny and touching film about an Italian-American family in Brooklyn.  She’s made only a handful of films since then, including Franco Zeffirelli’s Tea with Mussolini in 1998.  Cher has a few movies due out this year and next.  She’ll co-star with Christina Aguilera in the musical Burlesque, perform the voice of the giraffe in the comedy The Zookeeper, and star in another comedy, The Drop-Out.

Cher is now in her sixties, and despite a farewell tour this past decade, shows little sign of slowing down.

Academy Award nominations
Silkwood (1983, BSA)
Moonstruck (1987, BA)*
* Won Oscar

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Moonstruck (1987)
Norman Jewison, director
Cher, Olympia Dukakis

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Silkwood (1983)
Mike Nichols, director
Cher, Meryl Streep

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Quote of Note
Ronny:  I love you.
Loretta (slapping him):  Snap out of it!
—Ronny Cammareri (Nicolas Cage), Loretta Castorini (Cher), Moonstruck (1987)

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1. Aferdit Uka says:

   April 27, 2011 at 3:48 am

   i really like to have movie with Cher. this is my dream/