The opening synthesizer lines of the song “Flashdance… What a Feeling” offer a sense of promise — something big is about to happen. And the tune, performed by actress and singer Irene Cara for the soundtrack of 1983’s Flashdance, delivered, becoming a hit single and winning the Oscar for best original song in 1984. In fact, it was the only award that the film won, though the drama was also nominated for cinematography, editing and again in the original song category, for another synth-pop hit, “Maniac.”
Producer Jerry Bruckheimer enlisted composer and producer Giorgio Moroder, with whom he had worked on the 1980 film American Gigolo, to write the music for Flashdance, about an aspiring ballet dancer, played by Jennifer Beals, who works by day as a welder and by night as a cabaret performer. Moroder, an electronic music pioneer who had won an Academy Award for his score for 1978’s Midnight Express, brought on Keith Forsey and Cara to write the lyrics for “What a Feeling.” The song was released in March 1983 as a single before Flashdance’s April debut, and would spend six weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. (The film went on to become a surprise box office hit, grossing $92.9 million domestically, making it the third-highest-earning film of the year.)
A year later, Cara took the stage at the 56th Academy Awards, singing “What a Feeling” and dancing alongside 46 New York City student dancers. Later that evening, Beals and Matthew Broderick presented Cara and Forsey with the award for best original song (Moroder did not attend). In her acceptance speech, Cara said, “It’s so wonderful to be receiving this most precious honor from Jennifer Beals, whose performance in the film made it that much more special for us.” Cara also thanked Alan Parker, who had directed her in Fame, in which she played aspiring star Coco Hernandez and for which she had also performed the theme song, “Fame,” the winner of the best original song Oscar in 1981.
This story first appeared in a January standalone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
