Cher’s history of directorial feuds: “Look, motherfucker, you didn’t find me under a rock”
It’s long been a rite of passage for musicians to try their luck on the silver screen, and befitting the success she’d already experienced as an era-defining popstar, it was only natural that Cher wasted little time in conquering cinema.
She was already a world-renowned celebrity and pop culture icon before she even took her first plunge into the movie business, but Cher’s filmography was relatively sparse up until the 1980s. In fact, she appeared in a trio of features between 1965 and 1969, and that would be it for 13 years.
When she returned, it came working with Robert Altman on Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, and by the end of the decade she was drowning in accolades. In that eight-year stretch, Cher won an Academy Award from two nominations, landed two Bafta nods, won a ‘Best Actress’ prize at Cannes, and took home two Golden Globes.
Clearly, she was quite good at the whole acting thing, but she didn’t always get along with the people calling the shots. The same year she delivered an Oscar-winning turn in Moonstruck, Cher appeared alongside Jack Nicholson in George Miller’s The Witches of Eastwick, landing the role even after the director called her up and told her, “I think you’re too old and you’re not sexy.”
“I was like, ‘OK, look motherfucker’, yeah, I said the whole thing,” came the fiery response. “I said, ‘You didn’t find me under a rock. I was nominated for an Academy Award for Silkwood. And I got the Cannes Film Festival award for ‘Best Actress’ for Mask. So, goodbye!’”
Speaking of Mask, Cher had already rubbed that film’s director, Peter Bogdanovich, the wrong way, with the auteur calling her the most difficult actor he’d ever worked with. “Well, she didn’t trust anybody, particularly men,” he told Vulture. “She doesn’t like men. That’s why she’s named Cher: She dropped her father’s name. Sarkisian, it is. She can’t act. She won ‘Best Actress’ at Cannes because I shot her very well.”
That reputation didn’t disappear over time, either, with Cher referring to Burlesque helmer Steven Antin as a “really terrible director” who gave her a “really terrible script” to work with. It was a movie she ultimately regretted making and yet another megaphone wielder who’d gotten on her bad side.
Self-confidence is what made Cher a superstar in the first place, and it directly informed how she deals with her cinematic collaborators. “You just have to be as smart as I am,” she once said. “If the director is smart, he is worth his weight in gold. Otherwise, I just want him to leave me alone.”
Clearly, Miller, Bogdanovich, and Antin didn’t fulfil that remit. Each infuriated the legendary songstress in their own way, and she was happy to let them know.
