Irene Cara born 18 March 1959

Irene Cara (March 18, 1959 – November 25, 2022) was an American singer and actress.

Irene Cara Escalera was born in the Bronx, New York, the youngest of five children of Louise, a Cuban-American cinema usher, and Gaspar Escalera, a Puerto Rican factory worker and saxophonist. From five years old she studied piano, dance and acting, making her Broadway debut, aged nine, in the musical She started singing and dancing professionally on Spanish-language television and made early TV appearances on The Original Amateur Hour (singing in Spanish) and Johnny Carson's The Tonight Show. 

In 1971, she was a regular on PBS's educational program The Electric Company as a member of the Short Circus, the show's band, appearing as a member during the show’s first season. In 1975 she made her film debut as Angela in Aaron Loves Angela, a “Romeo and Juliet” comedy drama set in Harlem. The following year she played the title role of Sparkle Williams in the Sparkle (1976), a rags to riches musical loosely based on the story of the Supremes. John Willis' Screen World, Vol. 28, named her one of twelve "Promising New Actors of 1976"; that same year, a readers' poll in Right On! magazine named her Top Actress.

Cara was proudest of landing a role in the 1979 television mini-series Roots: The Next Generations, in which she was cast as Alex Haley’s mother from adolescence to the age of 30. “Roots was the biggest thing in American TV history and it put my career and my mind on the right path,” she recalled. She burst on to the scene as rising star Coco Hernandez in Alan Parker’s 1980 hit movie Fame, topping the charts with the title track, which won Michael Gore a best original song Oscar.

                                    

The 1980 hit film Fame, directed by Alan Parker, catapulted Cara to stardom. She originally was cast as a dancer, but when producers David Da Silva and Alan Marshall and screenwriter Christopher Gore heard her voice, they re-wrote the role of Coco Hernandez for her to play. In this part, she sang both the title song "Fame" and the single "Out Here on My Own", which were both nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song. These songs helped make the film's soundtrack a chart-topping, multi-platinum album, and it was the first time that two songs from the same film and sung by the same artist were nominated in the same category. Cara had the opportunity to be one of the few singers to perform more than one song at the Oscar ceremony; "Fame", written by Michael Gore and Dean Pitchford, won the award for best original song that year, and the film won the Academy Award for Best Original Score.

Cara earned Grammy Award nominations in 1980 for Best New Artist and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, as well as a Golden Globe nomination for Best Motion Picture Actress in a Musical. Billboard named her Top New Single Artist, and Cashbox magazine awarded her both Most Promising Female Vocalist and Top Female Vocalist. Asked by Fame TV series producers to reprise her role as Coco Hernandez, she declined, wanting to focus her attention on her recording career; Erica Gimpel assumed the role.

In 1983, Cara reached the peak of her music career with the title song for the movie Flashdance: "Flashdance... What a Feeling", which she co-wrote with Giorgio Moroder and Keith Forsey. Cara wrote the lyrics to the song with Keith Forsey while riding in a car in New York heading to the studio to record it; Moroder composed the music. Cara admitted later that she was initially reluctant to work with Giorgio Moroder because she had no wish to invite comparisons with Donna Summer, another artist who worked with Moroder. The song became a hit in several countries, attracting several awards for Cara. She shared the 1983 Academy Award for Best Original Song with Moroder and Forsey, becoming the first black woman to win an Oscar in a non-acting category and the youngest to receive an Oscar for songwriting. She won the 1984 Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, 1984 Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song, and American Music Awards for Best R&B Female Artist and Best Pop Single of the Year.

In 1984, she was in the comedic thriller City Heat, co-starring with Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds and singing the standards "Embraceable You" and "Get Happy". She also co-wrote the theme song "City Heat", sung by the jazz vocalist Joe Williams. In May 1984, she scored her final Top 40 hit with "Breakdance" going to No. 8. "You Were Made for Me" reached No. 78 that summer, but she did not appear on the Hot 100 again. In 1985, Cara co-starred with Tatum O'Neal in Certain Fury. whilst working on the film she met stuntman Conrad Palmisano whom she married (but the marriage was dissolved in 1991). In 1986, she appeared in the film Busted Up. Cara also provided the voice of Snow White in the unofficial sequel to Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Filmation's Happily Ever After, in 1993. The same year, she appeared as Mary Magdalene in a tour of Jesus Christ Superstar with Ted Neeley, Carl Anderson, and Dennis DeYoung.

Cara released three studio albums: Anyone Can See in 1982, What a Feelin' in 1983, and Carasmatic in 1987, the most successful of these being What a Feelin'. In 1985, she collaborated with the Hispanic charity supergroup Hermanos in the song "Cantaré, cantarás", in which she sang a solo segment with the Spanish opera singer Plácido Domingo. Cara toured Europe and Asia throughout the 1990s, achieving several modest dance hits on European charts, but no U.S. chart hits. She released a compilation of Eurodance singles in the mid-to-late 1990s titled Precarious 90's. Cara also worked as a backup vocalist for Vicki Sue Robinson, Lou Reed, George Duke, Oleta Adams, and Evelyn "Champagne" King.

On the back of her success, Irene Cara paid a high price for fame, losing her husband, battling drink and drugs and becoming embroiled in an eight-year court battle with her record company over unpaid royalties from the Flashdance soundtrack and her first two solo records. This ended in 1993 with a ruling in her favour but with an award of only $1.5 million in unpaid royalties out of the $12 million she had claimed. Cara stated that, as a result, she was labelled as being difficult to work with and that the music industry "virtually blacklisted" her. She continued to land parts in films, though later on these mainly involved voice work. In 1997 Irene Cara recorded a new version of Flashdance with Germany’s star rapper, DJ BoBo for The Full Monty.

In the 2000s she formed her own production company, overseeing the all-female group Hot Caramel which she formed in 1999. Their album, called Irene Cara Presents Hot Caramel, was released in 2011.

Cara died from arteriosclerosis and hypertensive heart disease at her home on November 25, 2022, at 63 years of age; she also had diabetes. At the time of her death, Cara was a resident of Florida, living in Largo and maintaining a secondary address in New Port Richey, where her company, Caramel Productions, was located. “I wouldn’t wish fame on anyone, ” she said in 2009. “If I could go back, I’d be a lot less trusting of the people who were handling my career. I didn’t know the nature of the beast.”

(Edited from Wikipedia & The Telegraph)