By FRANK BRUNI


On a nippy evening in November, as she curled up in a Manhattan hotel , Cher was exhausted. Getting old, she said, stinks. She teases that she’s 100 and puts the real number, 64, so far out of mind that, she said, “I should probably tattoo it on my hand to remember.” But she is constantly reminded. “It’s harder to do things,” she said.

“I’ve beat my body up so badly, it’s amazing it’s still talking to me and listening to what I say. But I’ve got aches and pains everywhere.” This is deeply unsettling. We’ve seen Sonny’s Cher; “Silkwood” Cher; “Moonstruck” Cher; disco Cher.

But geriatric Cher - Across nearly half a century of hit records, acclaimed movies, gaudy concert spectacles and a magnitude of celebrity, Cher has come to seem the Sherman tank of divas, sometimes under fire but grinding onward, armored and unstoppable.

And in her new movie, “Burlesque,” a glossy musical now showing in North America and opening worldwide this winter, she essentially promises that this won’t change. She plays a tough showgirl who takes a talented ingenue (Christina Aguilera, making her film debut) under her lavishly feathered wing, and she has a power ballad, written expressly for her, in which her character proclaims that she’s “far from over.” Titled “You Haven’t Seen the Last of Me,” Cher belts it like her very life depended on it.

But the Cher sitting at the Four Seasons Hotel was a smaller, quieter creature. She didn’t look old, not exactly. By all creaseless appearances, she and others have labored to prevent that. She didn’t dress old, either.

Her T-shirt clung to a svelte, taut frame . “Burlesque” is her first movie in seven years, and she has only one other in the works, “The Zookeeper,” in which, she said, she supplies the voice of a lioness. During much of that time she focused on her music ? her fouryear farewell tour, then a three-year commitment at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.

She said that she has always considered movies a bonus career. Sometime early next year, she said, she will don yet another persona, introducing and reflecting on old films after midnight on the Turner Classic Movies channel.

It’s surprising, but also a window into Cher’s success. For all her audacity (the boundary-pushing outfits, the tabloid-fodder affairs) she has always been acutely conscious of her own limits. A lthough her span of hit singles stretches from “I Got You Babe” in 1965 through “Song for the Lonely” in 2002, Cher has never taken that astonishing durability as license to explore any genre that tickled her fancy.

She nabbed top acting honors at the Cannes Film Festival for her role as the red-haired biker mom in “Mask” in 1985 and won the best actress Oscar for playing a widow in “Moonstruck” two years later, but she never attempted Broadway musicals, or Shakespeare.

“Look, I have a very narrow range,” she said. “If you look at my characters, they’re all me.” Mike Nichols, who directed her in “Silkwood,” for which she received an Oscar nomination , said: “I heard her on the radio once, somebody was interviewing her, and they said, ‘How do you feel about the Middle East?’ She said: ‘Listen, I’m Cher. You don’t want to know what I think about the Middle East.’ She knows who she is.”

During a recent interview there wasn’t a single topic that made her flinch. The transformation of her daughter, Chastity Bono, into a son, Chaz? “We talked about it a lot over the years,” she said. But she had always attributed her daughter’s discomfort with her gender to a general sadness brought on by drug abuse.

The love of her life? Not Sonny Bono, with whom she shared a career and a marriage until they split up in 1974, but the onetime bagel baker Robert Camilletti, “even though he’s like 1,000 years younger.” She was 40 and he was 22 when they met in the late 1980s. There’s no man now, although she recently dated Ron Zimmerman, a comedian she met on Facebook. (She is on Twitter, too. “I’ve been around 100 yrs I know a Gazzilion cool things! I’m pass’n it on xxme,” read one Tweet.)

Coolness notwithstanding, she is cautious. She initially said no to “Burlesque,” then maybe, then asked for rewrites. “I was nervous,” she said. “And I hadn’t made a movie in a long time. And I have my own opinions about things.

“You’re around these girls who are 20 years old with perfect bodies, and you remember when you used to have a perfect body,” she added. She shook her head. Smiled. “Just to stay in the competition ?” she stopped, leaving the sentence unfinished.