Irene Cara has been building her career since early childhood. She was born in the New York borough of the Bronx into a family of five children. Her father has roots in Puerto Rico, her mother in Cuba. Irene Cara made her Broadway debut as a child and acted for years before taking up music.
In 1980, at the age of 21, she immediately became world famous for her role as Coco Hernandez in the film “Hunger”. She tells the story of a group of students from the High School of Performing Arts in New York. The movie is so successful that a television series and a musical about the same story are later made.
In “Fame”, Cara not only plays the lead role, but also sings the song “Out here on my own” and the title track “Fame”, which earned her two Grammy Awards and the Academy Award for Best Original Score . All these years later, the song still pops up on all kinds of year-end lists.