“Fame” star Irene Cara’s cause of death reportedly resulted from hypertension and high cholesterol.
According to TMZ, which claimed to review the 63-year-old’s medical documents from the medical examiner in Florida’s Pinellas County, the singer’s official cause of death is arteriosclerotic and hypertensive cardiovascular disease.
The documents also allegedly state Cara was diabetic.
The Post has contacted the medical examiner’s office, as well as a rep for Cara.
Cara died on Nov. 26 inside her Largo, Florida, home. She is best known for massive soundtrack hits for the films “Flashdance” and “Fame.”
Her top hits included “Fame” in 1980 and 1983’s “Flashdance … What a Feeling,” the latter of which she won an Academy Award for Best Original Song and a Grammy Award for Best Pop Vocal Performance.
Although she once sang that she wanted people to remember her name, the ’80s icon allegedly became a “recluse” in recent years.
“She didn’t talk to anyone,” Roseann Nolan, who lived across the street from Cara, told The Post in December. “I didn’t even know it was her living there until a few years ago. It was the best-kept secret ever.”
Her next-door neighbor, Maria Contreras, 59, also told The Post that Cara would never take her up on offers to take walks on the beach or socialize. Contreras claimed she tried to befriend Cara even before knowing about her glitzy past but no one, even the man who mowed her star’s yard, ever went inside her house.
“She greeted you outside by the garage,” Contreras recalled.
“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,” she added.
However, Cara’s representative, Judith Moose, and her Los Angelles manager of nearly two decades, Betty McCormick, had a different version of Cara in recent years. McCormick told The Post that she disagreed with neighbors’ assessment of Cara’s last years, but she did admit that the COVID-19 pandemic was tough on the singer.
“She was very afraid of getting the [COVID] virus,” McCormick said. “She really struggled during that period.”
Her reps also told The Post that Cara left Hollywood and the music industry on her own terms, for the most part, and had been trying to revive her career in the months prior to her death.