Film Fact: Armenia

To celebrate the weird and wonderful Eurovision Song Contest, we present weird and wonderful film facts about this year's finalist countries.

You may know her as Cher, but in Armenia she will forever be Cherilyn Sarkisian. Like many superstars, the singer and actress who has only ever needed one name to be recognised, was so famous for so long that she outgrew her past, but even celebrities have a background. In the case of Cher it involves an Armenian father who had fled the country as a boy in the 1920s with his parents. John Sarkisian was a truck driver whose bad habits eventually landed him a jail sentence, but he bestowed a sense of the country on his daughter, which lasted long after she left home at the age of 16 to move to Hollywood in the pursuit of fame. That came in the company of Sonny Bono, and would go on to encompass being a gay icon, straddling a large gun on the deck of a battleship and many, many wigs. Thank you, Armenia.