Irene Cara, a singer who hit stardom with ‘Fame’ and ‘Flashdance,’ dies at 63
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Irene Cara, second from right, and Keith Forsey, winners of the 1984 Academy Award for Best Song for the movie “Flashdance,” pose backstage with presenters Mathew Broderick and Jennifer Beals. (Getty Images/Bob Riha Jr.)
Irene Cara, a child actor who subsequently sang the title songs to “Fame” and “Flashdance” as anthems of the 1980s’ exuberant inventiveness and freedom, but who later engaged in a court struggle over royalties that derailed her career at its height, passed away on November 26 at her home in Largo, Florida. She was 63.
The reason for Ms Cara’s death was not immediately revealed, according to a statement from her spokeswoman, Judith A. Moose. The Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office verified it responded to a call to Ms Cara’s home at a Largo location that is recorded in public records. A request for comment was not immediately answered by the District 6 Medical Examiner’s Office, which serves Pinellas County.
As “Fame” (1980) and “Flashdance” (1983) became touchstones for the 1980s with their music and style, including the urban chic of New York teens in “Fame” and the free-form moves and leg warmers (and, of course, the famous wet-and-wild shower scene), Ms Cara’s influence on pop culture has endured over the years.
Nearly 40 years later, Ms Cara’s “Flashdance… What a Feeling” is still No. 38 on Billboard’s list of the All-Time Hot 100 Songs. Through spoofs, social media throwback footage, and reboots, it appears to keep attracting new viewers.
She sang songs from “Fame,” including the title tune with its booming refrains like “I’m going to live forever,” while portraying Coco Hernandez, one of the pupils attempting to get into New York’s High School for the Performing Arts. Baby, keep my name in mind. (The movie received an Oscar for best original score.)
Then, after being asked to sing a few of the songs for the movie Flashdance, What a Feeling, starring Jennifer Beals as a welder by day and an exotic dancer by night who dreams of performing on the ballet stage, Ms Cara earned her own Oscar.
But Ms Cara was never able to reach such heights again. She filed a lawsuit in 1985 against record industry executive Al Coury for $10 million, alleging that he had abused her trust by signing “unjust and onerous” contracts for film and record deals that left her out of a sizable royalty payment.
When Coury was the company’s president in 1980, Ms Cara first agreed to a six-year recording contract with RSO Records Inc. He convinced Ms Cara to provide him sole authority over her career before departing in the early months of 1981 to start his own business, Network Records Inc. What transpired afterwards was a result of poor decision-making, poor management, and Ms Cara’s failure to reproduce the magic of her two successful initiatives.
Irene Cara’s popular albums
Her two primary studio albums, 1983’s “What a Feelin‘” and 1982’s “Anyone Can See,” failed to achieve the same level of popularity in the marketplace as the film singles. She then agreed to appear in films that were swiftly forgotten, such as “D.C. Cab” (1983), which starred the 1980s actor Mr T with a mohawk.
“Charismatic,” an album, was first shelved before being released in 1987. She had become a celebrity footnote and trivia question by the early 1990s. In a 1993 editorial, syndicated gossip writer Liz Smith asked, “Remember Irene Cara?” and stated that Ms Cara had received just $183 in royalties over the course of her four years working for Coury.
In her lawsuit against Coury, she received a $1.5 million verdict from a Los Angeles jury earlier that year.
In a 2018 interview with the music website Songwriter Universe, she said, “It took me eight years to go through the whole good ol’ boy network in the music industry because it appeared like I sued one individual and it just sort of spun into the entire industry turning against me because of it. Consequently, it completely turned me off from the music industry.
Ms Cara made a comeback to music in 2011 with the all-female band Hot Caramel. She had previously played supporting roles in a number of movies for years, but neither the box office nor the critics had given her any notable successes. With a “steel” line directly lifted from “Flashdance,” one of its songs, “Life in the Fast Lane,” seems to offer some of Ms Cara’s reflections on her own stardom and struggles.
She sang, “All alone I have cried/silent tears of pride.” In a steel-made universe.
irene cara family photo
Musical family
Irene Escalera was the youngest child of a family with a developing musical career when she was born on March 18, 1959, in the Bronx. Saxophonist Gaspar Escalera, her father, was a member of a well-known mambo ensemble. She remembered that her sister played the piano and that her stepbrother was active in opera.
When she was 7 years old, Ms Cara performed in nightclubs with her father’s band and got a role in an off-Broadway production of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” while also shortening her last name to Cara. By the time she was twelve, her resume had started to move in a number of different ways.
She had a Spanish song album, participated in a Duke Ellington tribute performance at Madison Square Garden, had a small part in Shirley Jones’ 1968 Broadway musical “Maggie Flynn,” which also starred Rita Moreno, and was a founding member of the cast of the ground-breaking children’s television programme “The Electric Company,” which starred Bill Cosby, Morgan Freeman, and Rita Moreno. (She made no mention of Cosby’s inappropriate behaviour; she simply called him “lovely to all of us kids.)
Ms Cara received star credit in the musical movie “Sparkle” about a budding “female group” in Harlem in 1976 Sparkle Williams. The movie wasn’t a big blockbuster, but it did well with Black audiences and sparked a 2012 remake with Whitney Houston and Jordin Sparks.
Ms Cara was chosen to play Coco Hernandez in “Fame,” a New Yorker with a quick wit and a sharp tongue to match.
A student inquires, “So, you enjoy art flicks, right, Coco?”
Oh, Antonioni and those others. Coco answers. “Sure. It certainly beats watching “Laverne and Shirley,” don’t you think?
She also sang “Out Here on My Own,” the other major hit from the musical, in addition to the title song. Some critics, according to her, claimed she was attempting.
The lyrics of the possible theme song for “Flashdance” were still being worked on when Paramount Studios contacted her about it. She collaborated with drummer and lyricist Keith Forsey for a few hours one afternoon to complete the song, which had the phrase “now I’m dancing for my life.” But the music still lacked a title.
After watching the clips, “we left Paramount and got in the vehicle,” she said to the Associated Press in 1984. Let’s talk about the dance’s emotional impact, I recalled telling Forsey. The song “Flashdance… What a Feeling” was inspired by the lines and the phrase “dancing for my life.”
The song was the first of the movie’s successes, which also included “Maniac” and “Lady, Lady, Lady.” According to Ms Cara, it evolved into “a metaphor about a dancer, how she can be in control of her life while she is in control of her body when she dances.” She (also) won two Grammy Awards for the song.
Conrad Palmisano, a stuntman, and Ms Cara wed in 1986; they separated in 1991. She left behind a sibling. Not all of the survivors’ details were readily accessible.
Next “Flashdance,” Ms Cara was recognised as the year’s best female singer by music publications and other sources, with expectations for what might come after. Ms Cara was glowing and exuded confidence during the 1984 Academy Awards ceremony.
In the 2018 interview, she said, “I was putting on a façade of being on top of the world and being a success, while on the inside I was trying to figure out how to sue my company.” “So it was difficult. When everything was going wrong, I pretended everything was OK.
