Cheryl Barnes, a singer, starred as Hud’s mother in Milos Forman’s 1979 film adaptation of Hair. Barnes auditioned when she attended an open casting call. She was working in Maine as a maid at a motel. The film only shows one take of her song “Easy to Be Hard”. This is the complete take. The scene she did in the desert near the army base was shot in Barstow in California, where she remained. Milos Forman, the director of “Hair”, convinced her to come to New York for a couple months because he didn’t want to let such talent go to waste. Barnes, however, returned to Barstow where she was a piano teacher. She was friends with Milos, and she accompanied him to Prague where he was filming Amadeus. While at Union College in New Jersey, she was a member of Eve’s Garden, her first professional singing experience. She was the opening act on a variety of shows with that band, including the Classics IV, Vagrants (Leslie West), and Ten Wheel Drive. Cheryl was a performer in Leonard Bernstein’s Mass, as well as on Broadway in The Last Sweet Days of Isaac and Godspell. For the soundtrack to the 1980 film American Gigolo, she sang “Love and Passion”, music by Giorgio Moroder and lyrics written by Paul Schrader. In Doug Henning’s The Magic Show, she played Dina, the handmaiden. From Wikipedia
