Turning back time to Cher's Era

February 28, 2017 4:38 AM

If there were rules for how to be a serious actress, she would rewrite them | During her brief ’80s reign as one of film’s biggest stars, Cher didn’t disappear into roles—she brought her indelible presence to bear on women thought to be invisible and cast them into the light.

..Perhaps her talents would be more widely appreciated today had she risen to prominence in the time of the old Hollywood star system. Her presence in cinema recalls those of screwball comediennes like Carole Lombard and Irene Dunne, who possessed a basic consistency of persona. Nowadays, though, actresses like Meryl Streep have set a new goalpost for American acting, resulting in a conflation of “best” and chameleonic, and a prizing of versatility as it has now come to be measured. Versatility is no longer simply defined as the agility between, say, dramatic and comedic styles, a skill Cher proved herself to possess. Versatility, as it stands today, is now judged through the ability to deftly handle an accent, a willingness to undergo laborious physical transformation, or to go method. The Streep school of acting dominates critical rhetoric surrounding acting at the expense of work like Cher’s, less technical and more spontaneous.

posted by I_Love_Bananas (9 comments total)

Good article. I hadn't ever really thought about her film career as a thing but that was a solid run of performances in the eighties.
posted by octothorpe at 4:55 AM on February 28, 2017

I had a blowout fight with a (now just barely not-former fried) about Cher's Twitter feed right after the election, and I wish I'd had this article to throw at them. I'm not that big a fan of Cher's actual work, but I am a huge fan of Cher. Her entire life has consisted of stomping into a medium or genre and saying "I am going to do this thing, and I am going to do it in my way, and some of you -- mostly the gatekeepers of the status quo -- are going to hate that, and I. Do. Not. Fucking. Care. in the least little bit. Oh, and some kids (regardless of age) who don't fit everyone else's models are going to see what I'm doing and hang on for a couple more days, and that's good enough, thanks."
posted by Etrigan at 6:21 AM on February 28, 2017 [21 favorites]

Wow. It's really hard to read how all these male critics and male directors and men in her sphere treated her. It's not surprising but holy crap the invisible bar for women is so high. "Jump woman! Oh-ha-ha, you're trying too hard now."
posted by amanda at 6:53 AM on February 28, 2017 [8 favorites]

Moonstruck is one of my favorite movies, and the fact that Cher is able to slide effortlessly into the tone of that film is both extremely impressive and very easy to take for granted. She does a lot of the heavy lifting of making the scenario feel real even though it's alllllmost magical realism.
posted by selfnoise at 7:20 AM on February 28, 2017 [5 favorites]

I remember seeing Cher in 'Moonstruck' when I was an 18 year old horror fan (dragged to the cinema by a girlfriend in college), and being very pleasantly surprised.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 7:21 AM on February 28, 2017

I had a conversation, ages ago, with a friend with whom I discovered I shared a guilty pleasure: The Witches Of Eastwick. We came up with a great idea for a sequel, "The Warlocks of Eastwick" where a trio of boys, friends since birth, all vie for the affections of a new girl in town (guess who?), y'know, standard 'reboot' fare. I mentioned that we could still get all of the principals of the original movie to make cameos, and he snorted derisively "Yeah, but then we'd have to endure more of Cher's so-called 'acting'! Ha!"

The look I gave him shut that shit right down.
posted by eclectist at 8:20 AM on February 28, 2017 [1 favorite]

I think it's fantastic that Cher and Meryl Streep went from being mutually intimidated by each other to becoming good friends. Both of them endured a lot of crap in their careers (the way Dustin Hoffman treated Streep when they were filming Kramer vs. Kramer makes my blood boil), and I have so much respect for both of them for managing to excel in pretty toxic environments.

I rewatched Suspect a while back (hadn't seen it in a long time), and while a lot of it hasn't aged well (the plot seems ludicrous to me now), I thought Cher did a great job as the world-weary public defender.
posted by creepygirl at 8:44 AM on February 28, 2017

I would say Cher is an accomplished comedic actor in the mode of Rosalind Russell. Both have big personalities that shine through in all their roles, but their various performances are in no way interchangeable. So while Russell was always a Big Presence in her films, you couldn't accurately say that the people she played in His Girl Friday, The Women, and Auntie Mame are all that similar as characters. The same is true of Cher's performances in, say, Moonstruck, Mermaids, or the underrated Peter Bogdanovich film Mask—they are all very much Cher, but the nuances she adds make them discretely unique characters.
posted by Atom Eyes at 10:33 AM on February 28, 2017 [1 favorite]

I've always dug Cher, even since way back during the Sonny and Cher show and the song Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves, so the premise of the article about Cher's talent as an actress is no problem for me, but some of the points of argument, or more the comparisons and claims are a bit overblown. I mean recent Academy Award winners include Jennifer Lawrence, Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett, and Natalie Portman, none of whom were all that "Streepian", method, or laboriously tranformed in their films exactly.

As to that sort of transformative performing, actors too have had that judged to their benefit in the further away past, like Daniel Day Lewis and Robert DeNiro famously, so this is't entirely an actress thing, save, importantly, for "deglamourizing" which is definitely an actress issue, playing someone unattractive can sometimes seem to gain notice simply for that in a way that isn't the same for actors.

The author would have been better served, I think, by simply noting more of Cher's abilities and performances than in focusing so much on weak comparatives and behind the scenes chatter since Cher doesn't need those sorts of ad hominem inuendos or straw womening for defense. Her work stands out on its own merits and, yes, charisma which is an inseparable part of movie stardom.
posted by gusottertrout at 10:59 AM on February 28, 2017 [1 favorite]