Cher

At 16, she dropped out of school and moved to Los Angeles, where she talked her way into Phil Spector's studio and sang backup on recordings for the Ronettes and the Crystals. Sonny Bono was already there. I Got You Babe knocked the Beatles off the top of the UK chart in 1965, and at one point reportedly five Sonny & Cher songs sat simultaneously in the Billboard Hot 100 top 50. She kept a solo career running at the same time. The duo was always the vehicle, but she was always the one people were watching.

The comeback that mattered most happened at 52, when Believe (1998) hit #1 in 23 countries and introduced the world to audible Auto-Tune as a creative tool, a technique now named after her. The Farewell Tour that followed ran for three years and grossed nearly $250 million. She finally got into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in October 2024, 34 years after she first became eligible and inducted by Zendaya, which is a sentence that tells you everything about her staying power.

Her father was an absent Armenian-American whose parents fled the Ottoman genocide. When Half-Breed was climbing charts in 1973, she was telling press she was part Cherokee. She later confirmed that was false. Her son with Sonny, Chaz Bono, publicly transitioned in 2009 and became a leading trans activist, a chapter she navigated with notably little drama. She's been dating someone roughly 40 years her junior since 2021 and seems to consider this unremarkable.