CHER TERROR!
How playing Meryl Streep’s mum in Mamma Mia sequel left the movie star a nervous wreck
SHE could only be Cher, strutting in to Hollywood’s fashionable London Hotel 20 minutes after the appointed time.
‘I’m the late Cher,’ she murmurs, deadpan, her slight figure clad in layers of embroidered black reminiscent of her Gypsys, Tramps and Thieves pop music heyday in the Seventies, her face framed by a riot of jet-black ringlets.
Not only has she won a Grammy, an Emmy, three Golden Globes and an Oscar, she’s the only artist to date to have had a No 1 single in every decade since the 1960s.
Now 72, she’s about to be seen on the movie screen again, playing the grandmother from hell in Mamma Mia! Here We Go again.
So, why is she still at it? ‘I don’t know,’ she says in that famous throaty rasp. ‘I should be dead. I keep thinking: “I’m too old to do this. Why am I working so much?” ‘Or rather: “Why do people want
to work so much?” But I’ve always worked easily and I’ve always had a quick recovery time between projects. I didn’t even know I was 40 until I was 60.
‘I usually pick too many projects at one time and I end up doing the thing that sounds like the most fun. I’ve got myself into a lot of trouble saying: “Oh, that sounds like fun,” then when I get to do the thing, I’m terrified. But that’s the way I’ve always done it.’
In the Mamma Mia! sequel, she plays Ruby Sheridan, the mother of Meryl Streep’s donna (despite being only three years older than Meryl), who turns up out of the blue to see her estranged granddaughter Sophie (amanda Seyfried).
Cher has expressed her regret about not being able to be part of the first film — particularly because of the opportunity to reunite with old buddy and Silkwood co-star Meryl — because of a scheduling conflict.
WHEN
she turned up on the set of the gang’s second outing, then, she says she was more than a little daunted.
‘I was really nervous. Everybody else was calm because they’d worked with each other before. I didn’t know any of them except Meryl. I’d met Pierce Brosnan, but I didn’t really know him. I really was the new girl.’
To make matters worse, she and writer-director Ol Parker — known for The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel in 2011 — had locked horns before filming even began. ‘I’d been kind of mean to him before I even met him. When they showed me the script, I didn’t like my dialogue and I didn’t see how I was going to be able to play the woman that had been written.
‘So I said to him: “Look, you don’t know how to be this woman — I know her, so you need to let me write some stuff.”
‘So we didn’t get off to a great start and I walked on to the set feeling really frightened.’
as it turned out, she needn’t have worried. ‘ Everybody was just so kind. They were all like: “are you OK? are you comfortable? are you having a good time?” I wasn’t expecting that because they all knew each other well and I didn’t expect them to treat me the way they were treating each other.
‘But I have to say, it was the easiest set I ever worked on. I loved the film because there’s comedy and drama as well as music and it turned out that Ol was one of the best directors I’ve worked with.
‘at one point, I was having a hard time with this one piece of dialogue. It was a silly little thing I had to say in Spanish and I went over it again and again and I couldn’t get it. I knew I was taking up everyone’s time and that made me more nervous.
‘So I went to Ol and said: “I don’t know what’s the matter, I can do this when the camera’s not running, but the minute it’s running, I can’t do it.” So he held out his hand — it was rock steady — and said: “do you see that hand? does that look like I’m nervous?” I said: “No.” He said: “Then take as long as you need till you get it right.”
‘It was like that all the way through — no tension, however hard a time you were having.’
One of the best things about the shoot for Cher was the chance to hang out with Meryl, with whom she’s been close friends for more than 30 years. ‘We’ve always kept in touch, we talk and email and stuff all the time.
‘and she did a funny thing on this movie. I was on set singing my big song Fernando [her love interest in the film is a character called Fernando, played by andy Garcia] and I saw this shadowy figure lurking, but I didn’t take too much notice because I was singing. But it was Meryl!
‘She’d sneaked on to the set to watch me sing and, afterwards, she just ran up to me squealing — Meryl squeals, did you know that? — and we were laughing and hugging each other.’
CHER
adds: ‘My assistant said she’d been there the whole time, around the corner where I couldn’t see her, because she wanted me to concentrate on the song.’
It’s another notch in an extraordinary career, but I wonder if she has any regrets? She rolls her eyes. ‘We don’t have enough time to go there,’ she says. ‘ yeah, of course I do. But then, I think failure is highly underrated.
‘Because when you’re having success, you never think: “Oh my God, why am I having this?”
‘But when you have failures, you think about them. you ruminate, you want to explore. and I think that makes you better.’ MAMMA Mia! Here We Go Again is in cinemas from today.