“Mom is gone”, with this tweet Cher confirmed a few hours ago the death of her mother, Georgia Holt, at the age of 96. Last September the artist announced, also via social networks, that she Holt suffered from pneumonia: “she is going to and from hospitals, but she is better,” she explained.
Mom is gone????
– Look for) December 11, 2022
An actress and singer since she was a child, Holt began her career at the age of ten on a local radio station in Oklahoma, went through several beauty pageants and, during her youth, obtained some minor roles, even appearing on the mythical program ‘I love lucy’ on a couple of occasions. It was through Cher, her first daughter by her first husband, John Sarkisian (she was married six times, twice to Sarkisian) that Georgia Holt became a media figure. Her first big appearance was in the seventies with a very young Oprah. She joined her then-husband, Craig Spencer, to discuss her daughter’s career. After her, she appeared alongside her in various specials and talk shows, like those of Jay Leno and Ellen Degeneres, but perhaps her stellar moment was the documentary that her daughter dedicated to her in 2013: ‘Dear mom, love her’. Broadcast by the Lifetime channel, it was a tribute that the artist wanted to pay to her mother, who raised two daughters alone and postponed her needs as an artist to theirs. In the tape, Cher tells how Holt was regarding to have an abortion under pressure from her mother, but in the end she decided to raise her daughter as a single mother. “She never gave my sister or I (actress Georgeanne LaPiere) any advice, because she knew we weren’t going to listen to her. We learned from life by listening to him talk regarding his mistakes and his successes,” Cher says in the documentary, where mention is also made of the moment in which she told her mother that her son, Chaz Bono, was changing his sex: “very interesting », she answered. Thanks to the fame of the tape, Holt released an album ‘Honky Tonk Woman’ that same year, which she had recorded in the eighties.
The truth is that many of the dozens of great phrases that Cher has been pronouncing throughout her career are due to her mother, whom she always mentioned: «My mother told me that if I don’t pay attention to age, she he won’t pay attention to me, but I won’t buy it», or the mythical: «my mother told me a few years ago, ‘daughter, settle down and marry a rich man.’ And I told him ‘I am the rich man’.
One of Geogia Holt’s last public appearances occurred in 2014, when she attended the Drag Race program with her grandson Chaz. In the artist’s biographical musical, The Cher Show, which premiered in 2018 and is still running, Broadway actress Emily Skinner plays Holt.
