Cher (pronounced /????r/;[1] born Cherilyn Sarkisian on May 20, 1946)[2] is an American pop singer-songwriter, actress, director and record producer. She has won an Academy Award, a Grammy Award, an Emmy Award, three Golden Globe Awards and a People’s Choice Award for her work in film, music and television.

Cher began her career at the age of seventeen and came to prominence as one half of the pop rock duo Sonny & Cher with the success of their song “I Got You Babe” in 1965. She subsequently established herself as a solo recording artist, and became a television star in the 1970s with the variety show The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour, for which she won a Golden Globe Award. A well received performance in the film Silkwood earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 1984. In the following years, Cher starred in a string of hit films[3] including Mask, The Witches of Eastwick, and Moonstruck, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1988.

Cher is the only female solo artist to reach the Top Ten of the Billboard Hot 100 in each of the previous four decades.[4] Her hit dance single “Believe” is her biggest-selling recording and was the best-selling single of 1999,[5] having sold over 10 million copies worldwide.[6] She holds the Hot 100 record for the longest hit-making career span, with 33 years between the release of her first and most recent #1 singles, in 1965 and 1998.[7] Cher ended her 3-year-long “Farewell Tour” in 2005 as the second most successful tour by a female solo artist of all time.[8]

With a career lasting over 40 years, Cher has sold over 100 million records worldwide.[9][10] After a three-year hiatus and retirement from touring, Cher returned to the stage in 2008 at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas where she is currently performing her show Cher at the Colosseum.

Oprah Gail Winfrey (born January 29, 1954) is an American television host, producer, and philanthropist, best known for her self-titled, multi-award winning talk show, which has become the highest-rated program of its kind in history.[3]

She has been ranked the richest African American of the 20th century[4] and beyond,[5] the greatest black philanthropist in American history,[6][7] and was once the world’s only black billionaire.[8][9][10][11][12] She is also, according to some assessments, the most influential woman in the world.[13][14][15]

Winfrey was born into poverty in rural Mississippi to a teenage single mother and later raised in an inner-city Milwaukee neighborhood. She experienced considerable hardship during her childhood, including being raped at the age of nine and becoming pregnant at 14; her son died in infancy.[16] Sent to live with the man she calls her father, a barber in Tennessee, Winfrey landed a job in radio while still in high school and began co-anchoring the local evening news at the age of 19.[17]

Her emotional ad-lib delivery eventually got her transferred to the daytime talk show arena, and after boosting a third-rated local Chicago talk show to first place,[9] she launched her own production company and became internationally syndicated.

Credited with creating a more intimate confessional form of media communication,[18] she is thought to have popularized and revolutionized[18][19][20][21] the tabloid talk show genre pioneered by Phil Donahue,[18] which a Yale study claims broke 20th century taboos and allowed LGBT people to enter the mainstream.[22][23] By the mid 1990s she had reinvented her show with a focus on literature, self-improvement, and spirituality.

Though criticized for unleashing confession culture[21] and promoting controversial self-help fads, she is generally admired for overcoming adversity to become a benefactor to others.[24] In 2006 she became an early supporter of Barack Obama and one analysis estimates she delivered over a million votes in the close 2008 Democratic primary race,[25] an achievement for which the governor of Illinois considered offering her a seat in the U.S. senate.[26]