Cher was ‘shocked’ to discover her legal name after birth certificate mix-up

Pop icon had gone for years without knowing what was written on her birth certificate

Cher has revealed the painful discovery that her legal birth name was not what she thought it was, due to a mix-up on her birth certificate.

The pop icon recently released her memoir, Cher: the Memoir, Part One, which details her early childhood, career beginnings, relationships and rise to international fame.

In one chapter, the “Believe” star recalls how she applied for a copy of her birth certificate in 1979 and was “shocked” to see that her first name was legally registered as Cheryl.

“I believed Cherilyn was my name until the day years later when I decided to legally change my name to simply Cher,” she wrote, according to People.

She went on to explain how, in 1946, her then-19-year-old mother, Georgia Holt, had gone into labour a month early at a small hospital in El Centro, California, and endured a long and unmedicated labour.

“She was exhausted by the time I arrived at around 7.30am on Monday 20 May,” Cher said.

Cher realised her legal name wasn’t what she thought it was (Getty Images)

While her mother was recovering, a nurse came into the room and asked Holt what she planned on naming her new baby.

“My mother had no idea, but the woman insisted so she replied, ‘Well, Lana Turner’s my favourite actress and her little girl’s called Cheryl. My mother’s name is Lynda, so how about Cherilyn?’”

Learning about the nurse’s error, having written Cheryl instead of Cherilyn, the singer asked if her mum knew her real name. Holt, who died in December 2022 aged 96, apparently took the document from her daughter’s hands, looked at it and shrugged.

“I was only a teenager, and I was in a lot of pain,” she told Cher. “Give me a break.”

Cher legally changed her name in 1979, shortening her first name and dropping the four surnames she had at the time: her birth name Sarikisian, her stepfather’s surname LaPiere, and Bono and Allman from her marriages to Sunny Bono and Gregg Allman.

Elsewhere in her memoir, Cher wrote of how she discovered she was effectively trapped in “involuntary servitude” to her first husband, Bono, due to the contract he had her sign for their working partnership.

She also delivered a scathing verdict of the only two film directors she hated working with, branding one of them a “pig” who was “not nice to the girls in the film”.

Cher: The Memoir, Part One, is out now.