Cher: I was crazy about Tom Cruise during our fling

After alluding to it earlier in the year, Cher has spoken frankly about her brief relationship with Tom Cruise.

She told Oprah Winfrey recently that the couple had a brief fling at the star of his career in the mid-1980s, when she was 39 and he was 23: “It could have been a great big romance because I was crazy for him.”

The pair are thought to have met at a political fundraising event but were driven apart after a few months by their busy work schedules in the wake of Tom’s hit Risky Business.

But Cher explained that his sudden rise to fame hadn’t yet transformed into the confident A-lister he is now: “He was shy. He said he felt like such a boob in school and nobody talked to him. We went on a date once for dinner in a New York restaurant and the waitress was from his old school.”

“He told me she never talked to him back in school, but now he was recognised he got all her attention.”

Tom is now on his third marriage but Cher, who’d been married twice before her fling with Tom, has been pretty much single since breaking up with her last serious boyfriend Rob Camilletti 15 years ago.

She explained: “Dating is a strange thing. It’s not every man who can be comfortable with me. Being Cher is a hard thing and difficult for him to hold his place.”