“Do you know what my dream is? To be able to dance. I changed after I saw Flashdance with Jennifer Beals,” says Nani Moretti in one of the unforgettable scenes from her “My Favorite Diary,” a 1993 film that won a director’s award at the Cannes International Film Festival the following year. The festival. Ten years earlier, in 1983, in another film, Jennifer Beals herself played the role of a Pittsburgh factory worker who becomes a strip club dancer at night, but dreams of becoming a ballerina. It was Flashdance, a film that, despite its blatant superficiality, took the planet by storm, grossing $200 million at the box office.

It was, of course, preceded by the 1980s film Fame, another dance-themed film. It featured then-26-year-old Alan Parker guiding the relationships, dreams, and choreography of New York dance school students, leaving a mark followed three years later by Flashdance (followed by Footloose in 1984 and Dirty Dancing in 1987).

Cinema is shallow yet deeply influential: from the early to late 80s, these films set the norms and trends that swept through society like a storm, based on a narrative that seems comical today: that which implies that an “outsider” , unlike every expectation, he succeeds – only because he fights and “believes in it.” The American Dream in its most clichéd, oversimplified version, drenched in the electric, neurotic television language of an MTV music video—in this case, a ballad, an anthem: Flashdance’s central theme is “What a Feeling.”

Wouldn’t it be an exaggeration to say that with the recent death of Irene Cara, the voice of this song, an entire era has come to an end? Tom Cruise may have been trying to convince us recently that all that naïve ’80s charm hasn’t completely disappeared by remaking a modern version of Top Gun, but—bad lie—he’s aiming for the only thing left of it: nostalgia.

But there is something about this song that is stronger than it. This is the secret material brought to his musical cosmogony from the very beginning in the 70s by his composer, the Italian magician of electronic music, Giorgio Moroder. And there are many who believe that the cinematic (and cultural) phenomenon that spawned “Flashdance” was based on his music. Others, in fact, say the same thing about the worldwide recognition of Iren Kara herself.

However, her rise to the top began with “Fame” when she played the role of teenage dance student “Coco Hernandez” and performed the film’s theme song of the same name, thus foreshadowing what happened three years later with “Flash Dance” : Both songs won Oscars for Best Original Song. Born in 1959 in the Bronx, a Hispanic New Yorker with a Cuban father and a Puerto Rican mother, Maria is a second-generation West Side Story who wanted to “thrive” in a sparkling America that “gives everyone a chance” , eventually becoming similar to her role as “Glory” in real life, quickly and impressively reaching the top.

In Flashdance, she actually sang Bill’s part – she even wrote the lyrics. The whole planet, watching the film, thought that Jennifer Beals was the voice of the song. Such was the identification of the singer and the protagonist of the film. After all, Kara was also a dancer – and the audience who saw “Glory” three years before knew this well.

However, by the time she achieved all this, she already had experience in show business, acting and singing in the theater from the age of eight. She was only 10 years old and sang in honor of Duke Ellington at Madison Square Garden. At the age of 17, she starred in the cult film Sparkle, about a musical group in the style of the Supremes.

The glory of 1980 and the brilliance of the first Oscar (which he received thanks to Dolly Parton and her song “9 to 5”) did not come from heaven. Kara got used to the blinding light of the spotlight with delicate fingernails. And yet, when she won her Oscar for Flashdance, she seemed shy in a sweetly awkward way.

The song was a monumental success. It spent six weeks at number one on the US charts and peaked at number two in the UK. It sold over a million copies and won (in addition to the Oscar) a Golden Globe for Best Original Song. Cara herself also won the 1984 Grammy for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance.

She passed away young (she was only 63 years old) of hitherto unknown causes on November 25 at her home in Largo, Florida. But the elixir of her immortality had already been conquered in 1983, when the shaman Moroder channeled it into the synthesizer of the intro to “What a Feeling”. What if the lyrics speak platitudes and say things like “take your passion and make it come true”? When this disco beat starts, it sounds like it came from outer space, and Kara’s performance floats gracefully above it. An interpretation that matches the material she gave and more. She was offered a ticket to eternity, and she redeemed it in the most brilliant way.