• Golden Globe Awards

Oral History: Cher on Families, Generations and Togetherness

For over 40 years the HFPA has recorded famous and celebrated actors, actresses, and filmmakers. The world’s largest collection of a kind – over 10,000 items – is now in the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences Margaret Herrick Library.

An icon of screen and song, Cher won a Golden Globe for Best Actress in TV Comedy in 1974, and two Globes for her work in film, in 1984 and 1988. She was a nominee in 1983 and 1997. Here is a Cher excerpt from 1987  – the year that saw her starring in The Witches of Eastwick, Suspect, and Moonstruck – the film that would give her the third Golden Globe.

“Europeans are much more interested in being together, talking together. Like they sit around for three hours at dinner or lunchtime at my boyfriend Roberts and Sonny’s parents’ houses. So I think Italians and French people are more interested in being together. Time could pass and no one turns on the TV. Old people and young people sit together. Three generations living in the same household.  It’s not an American thing to do at all and for me, it’s an ideal life. It’s like what I imagine America might have been like in the thirties and forties. Our life today is not the most satisfying life family-wise. Moonstruck for me was a very endearing comedy and I think that it’s very reflective of real Italian households. There’s a warmness there, there’s kind of a, you know, everyone fights and yells at each other but underneath there’s kind of a feeling of real warmth and it’s my old-fashioned kind of lifestyle.”