Cher: The durable diva

Even without ink,her flesh reminds her. Its harder to do things, she said. Ive beat my body up so badly. Ive got aches and pains everywhere.

Coming from anyone else her age,this plaint would be unremarkable. From Cher its unthinkable. Weve lived with more Chers than there are Barbies,or even Madonnas: Sonnys Cher; Silkwood Cher; Moonstruck Cher; disco Cher. But geriatric Cher?

Across nearly half a century of hit records,acclaimed movies,gaudy concert spectacles and a magnitude of celebrity for which the word fame is pathetically insufficient,Cher has come to seem the Sherman tank of divas,armoured and unstoppable.

And in her new movie,Burlesque,a glossy musical,she plays a hard-boiled,diehard showgirl who takes a talented ingénue Christina Aguilera,making her film debut under lavishly feathered wing,and she has a set-piece power ballad,written expressly for her,titled You Havent Seen the Last of Me. Cher belts it like its a battle cry.

Burlesque is her first movie in seven years,and she has one other in the can,The Zookeeper,in which she supplies the voice of a lioness.

For all her audacity the envelope-pushing outfits,the tabloid-chum affairs she has always been acutely conscious of limitsat least her own. Although her span of hit singles stretches all the way from I Got You Babe in 1965 through Song for the Lonely in 2002,Cher has never taken that astonishing durability as license to explore any genre.

She won the best actress Oscar for playing a briefly gray-haired widow in Moonstruck,but she never got it in her head to scale Shakespeare. I have a very narrow range, she said. Ive never tried anything more than playing who I am.

Mike Nichols,who directed her in Silkwood,for which she received an Oscar nomination as best supporting actress,said: I heard her on the radio once,somebody was interviewing her,and they said,How do you feel about the Middle East? She said: Listen,Im Cher. You dont want to know what I think about the Middle East. She knows who she is.

Theres something gloriously matter-of-fact about her,and during our conversation,there wasnt a single topic that made her flinch.

The transformation of her daughter,Chastity Bono,into a son,Chaz? We talked about it a lot over the years, she said. But she had always attributed her daughters occasionally stated discomfort with her gender to a general sadness brought on by drug abuse.

The love of her life? The one time bagel baker Robert Camilletti,even though hes like 1,000 years younger. She was 40 and he was 22 when they met in the late 1980s. .

Its an odd existence,Chers. When she flashed back to a favourite exercise class in Beverly Hills decades ago,the fellow crunchers and squatters were Raquel Welch,Ali MacGraw and,to a more limited and grudging extent,Barbra Streisand,who would go over,do two little things,and then walk around and talk, Cher said.

Stanley Tucci,who plays her caustic sidekick in Burlesque,said that before many scenes were shot,she would go through the same doubt-ridden ritual,telling him: I dont know how to act. I dont know my line. I cant do this. Stanley,help me.

In this movie,as in others,she doesnt overreach. She cedes the spotlight to Aguilera,who has at least double her screen time.

The girls in that film-the oldest one was 30, Cher said. Christinas 29.

Youre around these girls who are 20 years old with perfect bodies,and you remember when you used to have a perfect body, she added. Staying thin,she said,used to be relatively effortless. Not anymore. But she has certain expectations of herself,including this one,a sort of pledge.

Not too long from now,Cher predicted,Ill be back wearing high heels again. FRANK BRUNI