In her new memoir Cher: Memoirs, Part One, the 78-year-old music icon recalls a mix-up with her birth certificate when she was born. She shared that she didn’t immediately know her real name and had been called Cherilyn for many years before officially changing it to her stage name, Cher.
“I was actually named Cherilyn until a few years later when I decided to legally change my name to just ‘Cher,'” she wrote.
The confusion happened at the hospital when her mother, just 19 years old at the time, gave birth to her a month earlier than expected. Cher explained that in 1946, her mother, Georgia Holt, had a long, laborious delivery without any medication.
“By the time I was born, around 7:30 AM on Monday, May 20th, my mom was exhausted,” Cher wrote in her memoirs.
She explained that when her mother was recovering after the birth, a nurse asked for the baby’s name, and that’s when the misunderstanding occurred.
“My mom had no idea what to say, but the woman insisted, so she replied, ‘Well, Lana Turner is my favorite actress, and her little girl is named Cheryl. My mother’s name is Linda, so how about Cherilyn?'”
In the late 1970s, the Grammy Award-winning artist officially changed her name to Cher, dropping four surnames: her birth surname Sarkisian, as well as the surnames of her stepfather, Gilbert LaPiere, and her ex-husbands, Sonny Bono and Gregg Allman. To legally change her name, she needed to present her birth certificate, and when she saw it, she discovered that her name wasn’t what she’d thought it was her entire life.
“When people ask if they should call me Mrs. Allman, Mrs. Bono, Mrs. Bono Allman, or Miss Cher, I tell them, just Cher is perfect,” the artist concluded.
