Cher opted for the high road after inadvertently finding herself the subject of conversation during a recent instalment of The Graham Norton Show.
Last week, Cher was mentioned during an episode of Graham Norton’s BBC talk show which featured Hollywood legends Michael Douglas and Glenn Close, who previously shared the screen in the 1987 classic Fatal Attraction.
During the conversation, the host and guests discussed the fact that Glenn was yet to win a competitive Oscar for her acting work, despite a record-breaking run of nominations.
“She should have won with Fatal Attraction,” Michael said, pointing out Fatal Attraction was the fourth of Glenn’s eight nominations.
“Cher won that year,” he pointed out, and when Graham expressed his surprise, Michael remarked: “I know, that’s what we all said.”
The room pretty much erupted as people reacted to this shade, with Glenn softly remarking: “Michael! Be kind!”
“[Glenn gave] one of the greatest performances of all time,” Michael then added, to which Graham quipped: “But Cher put some grey in her hair.”
A rep for Cher had just four words in response to this dig, telling the New York Post simply: “Cher loves Michael Douglas.”
Elsewhere during their joint Graham Norton interview, the pair reflected on their experiences of making Fatal Attraction, with Glenn repeating a past story about how upset she was when the ending to the erotic thriller was changed.
She told Drew Barrymore last year: “There was an original ending that didn’t end up in the film. You know that [the character] loved Madame Butterfly – you saw her at the opera, with an empty seat next to her hair, seeing when Madame Butterfly kills herself with a knife. In the original ending, they have that terrible fight, and then she takes that same knife, and as Madame Butterfly is playing, she [kills herself with the knife], and she dies.”
Glenn continued: “They did shoot that scene. Yes. And when they tested it, the audience hated her so much for coming between that perfect little family – even though he, you know, cheated on his beautiful wife, but whatever – that they felt she needed to be punished even more.
When the All’s Fair star was told Fatal Attraction’s ending had been redone so that her character would be killed rather than taking her own life, Glenn said that, as the result of her research, she felt that suicide was a more realistic ending.
“I said, ‘I won’t do it, that’s not who that woman is’,” she recalled. “It was in a meeting with Adrian [Lyne], the director, a producer and Michael [Douglas], who I love. And I was saying [to Michael], ‘what if it was you, what if it was your character, what would you?!’, so furious.
“And he said, ‘hey, babe. I’m a whore’. So I called one of my great friends at the time, and he said, ‘you’ve made your point, now you’ve got to go with the team’. And let go.”
