After 16 Years in Showbiz, Irene Cara, 21, Gets Her Diploma in Movies with Fame
By David Sheff
She vows, "I'm gonna live forever," in her rousing hit from the movie Fame, but the real Irene Cara isn't about to wait that long. What's she done so far to get her name in lights? "You're obviously not from New York," Cara sniffs to an interrogator. "Everyone in New York knows what I've done."
That attitude better becomes a prima donna than a Donna Summer. But no one denies that, at just 21, Irene Cara is hot stuff. She was a regular on PBS' The Electric Company at 13. She starred in her first movie, Sparkle, at 16. She has acted in Tony-winning plays like The Me Nobody Knows and in the original off-Broadway cast of Ain't Misbehavin'. In 1979 she portrayed Alex Haley's young mother in Roots: The Next Generations. More recently, she played opposite Powers Boothe as a mistress of the Rev. Jim Jones in the Emmy-winning Guyana Tragedy.
So, for Cara, Fame is the inevitable name of her game. "After all these years, it just makes sense," she says. "I've been working longer and harder than most adults." It doesn't bother her that some see her role as Fame's overly ambitious student singer-actress, Coco, as typecasting. "In talent and ability, Coco was obviously modeled on me," she airily concludes. "I'm very well known in New York with all the casting people. I got the role in Fame even before they heard me sing."
The movie is set in a school modeled after New York's High School of Performing Arts (which refused official cooperation). Though some of her co-stars are actually older than she, Irene blesses them all as "unaffected kids; they were greatthey didn't need me for nothing."
Since its release, Cara's Fame hit has propelled the sound track LP to sales of more than 500,000, and now Out Here on My Own, her powerful ballad follow-up from the film, is also heading toward the top. Her musical training is solidshe once sang backup for Evelyn "Champagne" King and Lou Reedand, post-Fame this summer, she was chosen to open Ray Charles' 50th birthday concert in L.A. (The critics were lukewarm, however, and one Hollywood exec in the audience groaned, "She should go back to doing background vocalsshe's not a solo artist.")
