“Fame” star Irene Cara may have sung about wanting people to remember her name — but she turned her back on fame during her last days.
Cara’s neighbors in Largo, Fla. — where the hit ’80s singer-songwriter-actress died Oct. 25 at age 63 — said lived like a hermit in recent years and guarded her privacy obsessively.
“She was a recluse. She didn’t talk to anyone,” Roseann Nolan, who lived across the street from Cara, told The Post. “I didn’t even know it was her living there until a few years ago. It was the best-kept secret ever.”
Maria Contreras, 59, who lived next door to Cara for years, said she tried to befriend her before knowing who she was. But Contreras said she could never persuade Cara, who once lit up the stage with her electrifying live performances, to take a walk with her to the nearby beach or socialize.
“I’d text her or call her to invite her to come for a walk but I wouldn’t hear back for days,” Contreras told The Post. “And she’d never call back using her cell phone. She called from her computer because she was worried about privacy. She didn’t look well and she said she had health issues.”
Contreras said she never saw anyone come to the house except a man who mowed the lawn.
“But no one, including him, ever went inside her house,” Contreras said. “She greeted you outside by the garage. She got very angry with me when I took down a fence between our houses because I wanted to put a new one up. She sent me such crazy messages that i saved them on my phone. She was worried that she wouldn’t be safe with the fence down, even for a day.”
Cara’s representative, Judith Moose, and her LA-based manager of nearly two decades, Betty McCormick, paint a different picture of Cara in recent years. They told The Post that she left Hollywood and the music industry on her own terms, for the most part, and had been trying to revive her career in recent months.
McCormick was emphatic that drugs and alcohol did not play a part in Cara’s death, nor was it a suicide, she told The Post. She disagreed with the neighbors assessment of Cara’s last years but said the pandemic had been very tough on the singer.
“She was very afraid of getting the [COVID] virus,” McCormick said. “She really struggled during that period.”
The early fizzling of Cara’s once-spectacular career have led many to wonder why she all but disappeared from public life after making a huge splash at a young age.
Cara’s top hits were “Fame” in 1980 and 1983’s “Flashdance … What a Feeling.” She won an Academy Award for Best Original Song and a Grammy Award for Best Pop Vocal Performance, for “Flashdance.”
Born Irene Escalera in the South Bronx, she once claimed that her factory-worker father, Gaspar Escalera, originally from Puerto Rico, brought merengue to the US. Her mother, Louise Escalera, was a cashier of Cuban descent.
She was Irene from the block 10 years before Jennifer Lopez was born in The Bronx, and paved the way for Madonna, Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey.
Carey posted a screenshot of Fame along with Cara’s hit single after her death.
“I put on the…
Read More: The sad final days of ‘Fame’ star-turned-‘recluse’ Irene Cara