WE’VE GOT YOU, BABE!
Cher now has a Broadway musical named for her and featuring her songs.  She is 72 and so famous that like Elvis, Sting and Madonna, she uses only one showbiz name.
Her film career has sort of floundered recently, but she can be very, very good. She is best known as the hip, smart-mouthed, very independent woman against the world, either as a mom (single, of course!) or as a sidekick.
Cher holds her own as the tough-as-nails best friend of Meryl Streep in Silkwood (1983), a good film based on the true story of a whistle-blower pushed beyond the edge. Cher was nominated for an Oscar but lost to Linda Hunt for The Year Of Living Dangerously.
In Mask (1985) Cher is the determined mother of Eric Stoltz, a kid with a genetic disorder that makes him look like a freak. Cher is determined to make some kind of life for them in this interesting film about our differences and our similarities.
Cher is in exalted company in The Witches of Eastwick (1987) in which she, Michelle Pfeiffer and Susan Sarandon try to conjure up the perfect man and instead bring on the devil, played with fiendish glee by Jack Nicholson.
Winona Ryder is the bewildered teen-age daughter in Mermaids (1990). Cher is her mom, and she is sexy, profane and a constant source of humiliation and embarrassment to her kids. She pushes the idea of kids being embarrassed by their parents to an entirely new level, much to our delight. 
In Come Back To The 5 And Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982) Cher and her girlfriends hold a 20-year reunion of a James Dean fan club they formed as kids. Kathy Bates, Karen Black and Sandy Dennis all learn more about themselves 
than maybe they, or we, wanted to know. Robert Altman directed this rather strange 
little film that is not to all tastes but has its devotees.
Cher is a major player in Tea With Mussolini (1999), portraying a wealthy young widow expatriate living in Italy at the time of fascism’s rise. She sets up a trust fund for a young man recently orphaned, and during WWII she rescues Jews headed for extermination. The film is based on true incidents.  Cher holds her own amidst British icons Judi Dench, Joan Plowright and Maggie Smith.
Cher’s break-out role came in the wonderful Moonstruck (1987). She is a young widow who agrees to marry Danny Aiello because it’s convenient, then absolutely flips for his younger brother (Nicholas Cage). Cher is soft, charming and feminine and a real revelation in this role. And she earned the Best Actress Oscar!
All of the movies in this column are available on video. All are for big people.
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