Cher was born in the US on 20 May 1946 in El Centro, which is on the California/Mexico border. Her full neme is Cherilyn Sarkisian and she is part-Cherokee and part-Armenian, Turkish, and French. She left high school when she was 16 and went to Los Angeles, where sh planned to take acting lessons. There she met Salvatore Bono, who was working at the Gold Star Studios where Phil Spector was recording many famous singers. He discovered that Cher could sing, and they bocame the singing duo Sonny and Cher. Their first hit song was ’I got you, babe’, which topped the charts in 1965. Cher was still only 19. They got married and had a daughter, who they called Chastity. In 1975 Sonny and Cher were divorced, and later that year Cher married Greg Allman, who was another famous rock star. But two years later Cher was divorced for the second time because of Allman's drink and drugs problems. She decided to turn to acting again. In 1982 she appeared in her first major film, ’Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean’, which was well received by the critics and public. She went to on win Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival in 1985 for her role in ’Mask’, and she won an Oscar for ’Moonstruck’ in 1987.

/Source: Headway/