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| Birth Name(s) : Irene Cara |
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Full Irene Cara Biography
Irene Cara (born Irene Escalera on March 18, 1959, in The Bronx, New York City) is an American singer of African, Cuban and Puerto Rican descent.
Cara first captivated the audiences of her family sometime after her fifth birthday when she began to play the piano by ear. Cara soon moved into serious studies of music, acting, and dance. At the age of three, she was one of five finalists for the Little Miss America pageant.
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.
The motion picture Fame earned Irene Grammy nominations in 1980 for Best New Female Artist and Best New Pop Artist, as well as a Golden Globe nomination for Best Motion Picture Actress in a Musical. Billboard Magazine named Irene Top New Single Artist, while Cashbox Magazine awarded her both Most Promising Female Vocalist and Top Female Vocalist.
When Fame became a television series a few years later, Cara was asked by the TV series' producers to reprise her role as Coco Hernandez. But she turned them down, feeling that she had already done everything she could with the role in the film, and over additional concerns that her film work in the role might be diminished if the television show failed. As a result, newcomer Erica Gimpel, who looked similar to Cara, played the role instead. However, Cara did make a special guest appearance on the series in 1983 as a "successful alumna" of the performing-arts school portrayed in the series, singing her then-current hit single, "Why Me?".
In 1982, Irene earned the Image Award for Best Actress when she co-starred with Diahann Carroll and Rosalind Cash in the NBC Movie of the Week, Maya Angelou's Sister, Sister. Irene portrayed Myrlie Evers-Williams in the PBS TV movie about civil rights leader Medgar Evers, For Us the Living: The Medgar Evers Story; and earned an NAACP Image Award Best Actress nomination. She also appeared in 1982's Killing 'em Softly.
Cara was also pegged to star in her very own sitcom, entitled Irene, on NBC in 1981. Even though the pilot aired and received favorable reviews, the network did not pick it up for its fall season of new shows. It also starred veteran performers Kaye Ballard and Teddy Wilson, as well as newcomers Julia Duffy and Keenan Ivory Wayans.
In 1983, Cara appeared as herself in the film D.C. Cab, about a group of cabbies, starring Mr. T. As an in-joke, one of the characters, an obsessed Irene Cara fan, decorated his Checker Cab as a shrine to her.
In addition to her music and film work, Cara also continued to perform in live theatre during this period. In the summer of 1980, she briefly played the role of Dorothy in The Wiz on tour. Of course, this was the role that singer/actress Stephanie Mills created in the original Broadway production. Coincidentally Cara and Mills had shared the stage together as children in the original 1968 Broadway musical Maggie Flynn, starring Shirley Jones and Jack Cassidy, in which both young girls played Civil War orphans.
In 1983, Irene reached the apex 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 wrote the music.
Cara admitted later that she was initially reluctant to work with Georgio Moroder because she didn't want to invite further comparisons with Moroder's most famous client, Donna Summer, (1), but it paid off, as the result was a record which topped the charts around the world and won numerous accolades for Cara. She won the 1983 Academy Award for Best Song(Oscar); 1984 Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, 1984 Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song, Top Female Vocalist-Pop Singles, Black Contemporary Female Vocalist-Pop Singles, Top Pop Crossover Artist-Black Contemporary Singles, Pop Single of the Year, American Music Awards for Best R&B Female Artist and Best Pop Single of the Year.
In March 2007, the United World Chart ranked "Flashdance... What a Feeling" as the twenty-second most successful song in music history. The song was also rated on the list as the fourth most successful song by a solo female artist, behind Cher's "Believe", Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On", and Whitney Houston's version of "I Will Always Love You".
In 1984, she was in the Clint Eastwood - Burt Reynolds comedic thriller City Heat, in which she sang the standards "Embraceable You" and "Get Happy". In 1985, Cara co-starred with Tatum O'Neal in Certain Fury, a notorious box office and critical flop about women escaping prison. In 1986 appeared in the film Busted Up. Cara 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.
In June 2005, Cara won the third round of the NBC television series Hit Me Baby One More Time, performing "Flashdance (What a Feeling)" and covered Anastacia's hit "I'm Outta Love" with her current all-female band, Hot Caramel. At the 2006 AFL Grand Final in Melbourne, Cara performed "Flashdance (What a Feeling)" as an opener to the pre-match entertainment.
She lives in Florida and continues work in preparation for her band Hot Caramel's album. She also has her own production studio. |
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