The singer whose Fame burned out early
Irene Cara 1959–2022
At 20, Irene Cara was brimming with talent and ambition. In the Academy Award–winning title track of 1980’s Fame, the self-assured performing arts student she played ecstatically proclaims to the world, “I’m gonna live forever/I’m gonna learn how to fly/I feel it coming together/People will see me and cry.” Director Alan Parker knew she could act but initially wasn’t sure she was a strong enough singer for the role, but in a studio tryout Cara proved herself a powerhouse. Three years later, “Flashdance… What a Feeling,” the title track to another blockbuster film, proved she could write and sing an Oscar-winning song as well. “I don’t mean to sound immodest,” she said in a 1985 interview, “but I’d never had any doubt that I’d be successful.”
Cara was born Irene Escalera into a large Bronx family, said the Miami Herald. Her parents, a Cuban-American movie usher and a Puerto Rican–born mambo saxophonist, “recognized her talents early.” At age 5, she was playing piano; by 9, she’d made her Broadway debut. She appeared in the children’s TV series The Electric Company in the early 1970s, alongside Bill Cosby, Rita Moreno, and Morgan Freeman. By the time she was cast in Fame, she was already a veteran actress and backup singer. But the “edgy teen drama” about students at New York’s High School for the Performing Arts earned her mega-fame, said Vanity Fair. The “unforgettable, traffic-stopping” title number was one of two songs from the film that got Oscar nominations—and since Cara sang both, she was “competing against herself for the same movie, a feat that had not been seen before.”
But though she scored another hit with “What a Feeling,” the album on which it appeared would indirectly “derail her career,” said The Times (U.K.). She sued the record company for royalties in 1985, triggering an eight-year legal battle that eventually yielded a $1.5 million payout but, she claimed, got her blackballed from the music industry. Her later work saw no major successes. Performing, she revealed in a 2018 interview, was more something her parents steered her toward than something she’d wanted for herself. But she harbored no resentment. “I was able to fulfill their dreams for me before they passed away,” she said. “I’m happy about that.”