The Mario Lanza effect
Hollywood’s popular Caruso biopic
In 1951 the American film-star tenor Mario Lanza made a movie called The Great Caruso, a fictional account of his illustrious predecessor. Though the result is wildly inaccurate – Caruso’s family sued for damages and won – the film gave the Neapolitan tenor’s posthumous fame a major boost.
Born in 1921 – the year of
Caruso’s death – Lanza (real name Alfredo Cocozza) trained as a singer from the age of 16, but his operatic career was tiny: he sang a couple of performances as Fenton in Nicolai’s The Merry Wives of
Windsor and as Pinkerton in Madam Butterfly – and that was it. But he was good-looking and charismatic, and the quality of his voice was superb.
His first film, That Midnight Kiss, was released by MGM in 1949, and he went on to star in The Toast of New Orleans (1950) and Because You’re Mine (1952), though he was removed from The Student Prince (1954) with the exception of his singing voice; ongoing weight and alcohol problems contributed to his death at 38 in 1959.
But the impact of his Caruso film was profound as youngsters Plácido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti, José Carreras and Roberto Alagna were all inspired to emulate Lanza-ascaruso. ‘I decided there and then,’ said Carreras,
‘that I too would one day sing the great operatic roles so persuasively portrayed on the screen by the young American tenor’.