Cher has opened up about her secret visits to Tina Turner during her final days.
Their friendship dated back decades with the two famously performing duets together in the ’70s on Cher’s variety shows.
The Turn Back Time singer, 77, spoke to MSNBC’s The Beat with Ari Melber and reflected on how Turner was “really happy” even though she was “really sick” in the last months of her life.
“I started going to visit her because I thought, ‘I need to put this time into our friendship so that she knows we haven’t forgotten her,’” Cher said. “We all took turns going and spending time with her and it made her happy.”
The first time Cher visited Turner at her home in Switzerland, she recalled how Turner had warned her that she didn’t have much time to hang out.
WATCH: Cher reflects on her close friend Tina Turner's legendary life.
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"There was no other person like her. There was no other person who could come close to who she was." pic.twitter.com/lqhuCeobwt
“Then five hours later we were laughing like crazy and she wanted to get up and show everything that she’d bought in the house,” she continued. “She was having a good time in spite of the fact that she was really sick and not wanting people to know about it.”
Cher noted that Turner had “her dialysis machine in her house”. A dialysis machine is typically used by people with kidney failure or end-stage renal disease.
In recent years, Turner had suffered from declining health, having first suffered a stroke in 2013 before being diagnosed with intestinal cancer in 2016 and undergoing a kidney transplant donated by her husband Erwin Bach in 2017.
Praising her friend for the courage she had shown throughout her health woes, she added: “She fought this sickness for such a long time and she was so strong as you think she would be, but I know towards the end, she told me once, she said, ‘I’m really ready. I just don’t want to put up with this anymore.’
“There was no other person like her. There was no other person who could come close to who she was.
“She gave me lots of strength sometimes and I gave her lots of strength, too. I think we were perfect friends for each other truthfully.”
