EGN NEWS DESK
Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez, a South Philadelphia-bred soprano who sang within the opera homes of Europe and gained much more fame for enjoying the title function within the style-soaked 1981 French thriller “Diva,” died on Feb. 2 at her residence in Lexington, Ky. She was 75.
Her daughter and solely rapid survivor, Sheena M. Fernandez, mentioned the trigger was most cancers.
Trained on the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia and later on the Juilliard School in New York City, Ms. Fernandez made her mark within the Seventies as Bess within the Houston Grand Opera’s worldwide touring manufacturing of Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess.” The tour took her to Europe, the place she caught the attention of Rolf Liebermann, the impresario recognized for reviving the Paris Opera. He supplied her a two-year contract.
It was in a 1980 efficiency as Musetta in “La Bohème” alongside Plácido Domingo and Kiri Te Kanawa that she caught the eye of the French director Jean-Jacques Beineix, who was in search of a determine radiant sufficient to function the diva on the coronary heart of his forthcoming movie.
“Diva” was thought-about a high-water mark within the motion generally known as the cinéma du look, a high-sheen college of French movie usually centered on trendy, disaffected youth within the France of the Eighties and ’90s. A movie with all of the saturated colour and gloss of a Eighties music video, it was an art-house hit that grew to become a cult favourite for the initiated.
The story revolves round a younger opera fan named Jules (performed by Frédéric Andréi) who grows so infatuated with an American opera star named Cynthia Hawkins that he surreptitiously tapes certainly one of her performances — regardless of her well-known decree that none of her work be recorded, since it could seize solely part of the facility and immediacy of her grandeur.
That grandeur is on full show in Ms. Fernandez’s opening scene, as she takes the stage in a hauntingly weathered previous theater carrying a shimmering white robe and metallic eye shadow. She proceeds to mesmerize the home — and Jules — with a hovering rendition of the aria “Ebben? Ne andrò lontana” (“Well, then? I’ll go far-off”) from Alfredo Catalani’s opera “La Wally.”
Jules’s tape of the efficiency turns into a tool that leads him right into a swirl of underworld hit males, Taiwanese music pirates and whirring engines in a moped-focused chase scene that reaches into the Paris Metro.
Not all of the critics had been charmed. Vincent Canby of The New York Times known as the movie “an anthology of affectations.” But Pauline Kael of The New Yorker praised it as a “glittering toy of a film” that “dashes together with pell-mell gracefulness.” While extolling Ms. Fernandez as “awesomely lovely,” Ms. Kael even made the allowance that her “American-accented French and her amateurishness as an actress are ingratiating.”
“Diva,” the truth is, can be Ms. Fernandez’s solely movie function. In interviews, she mentioned that she had by no means any want to be an actress, believing that the static atmosphere of a movie set was no substitute for the electrical energy of the stage.
Still, in a 1987 interview with the radio host Bruce Duffie, she expressed satisfaction that her function had introduced publicity to opera “to a very completely different viewers who’re most likely not accustomed to going to the opera or listening to classical music.”
“More and extra, I discover in doing recitals and concert events that the viewers is youthful and youthful, and it’s as a result of they’ve seen the movie,” she added. “Not solely are they coming to see me, however they are saying they’re going to see another folks, and that’s nice.”
Wilhelmenia Wiggins was born on Jan. 5, 1949, in Philadelphia, the elder of two youngsters of Ernest and Vinelee (Clayton) Wiggins.
Her vocal abilities had been on show as early as age 5, when she sang with the choir of her household’s Baptist church. By her teenagers, her celestial soprano was retreating within the choir on the William Penn High School for Girls. She honed her voice with formal coaching below the soprano Tillie Barmach on the Settlement Music School in Philadelphia.
After graduating from the Academy of Vocal Arts, additionally in Philadelphia, in 1969, she earned a scholarship to Juilliard in New York. She married Ormond Fernandez, a mail service, in 1971 and in the end left Juilliard in 1973 and not using a diploma to lift her toddler daughter.
Ms. Fernandez later recalled the challenges she confronted as a Black performer attempting to carve out a profession within the Eurocentric world of opera.
“For a very long time I used to be afraid I couldn’t sing as a result of I used to be nervous how colour was affecting my possibilities,” The Washington Post quoted her as saying in a 1982 profile. “I needed I may sing behind a display and simply be judged on my voice.”
In auditions, she mentioned, she usually seen “the little falling of the face” when she arrived, which she interpreted to imply “We would really like you to do the function, however you’re Black.” Then, she added, “they’d discuss amongst themselves whilst you sang.”
While “Diva” was Ms. Fernandez’s final look on celluloid, it was merely a prelude to a protracted profession that included her New York City Opera debut in 1982, as soon as once more as Musetta in “La Bohème,” in addition to performances all through Europe.
In addition to creating Musetta her personal, she additionally made the title function in Verdi’s “Aida,” an Ethiopian princess held captive in historical Egypt, a signature. At one level she even carried out the function amid the temples of Luxor in Egypt itself.
In 1992, Ms. Fernandez gained a Laurence Olivier Award, the British equal of a Tony, for greatest actress in a musical for her rendition of Carmen in “Carmen Jones.”
She married Andrew W. Smith, a baritone with the Metropolitan Opera in New York, in 2001 and moved to Lexington, the place he was directing the voice program at Kentucky State University. He died in 2018. Her first marriage resulted in divorce within the early Eighties.
Motivated to finish her training, Ms. Fernandez earned a bachelor’s diploma in voice from the University of Kentucky in 2007 and later a grasp’s diploma in training from Georgetown College in Georgetown, Ky. The grasp’s program ready her for her eventual work as a special-education teacher in a Lexington elementary college.
Although she carved out a long-lasting place in cinema lore together with her function as a big-screen diva, Ms. Fernandez by no means tried to inhabit such a persona away from the stage, even when her film fame was contemporary.
She advised The Washington Post in 1982 that the movie “Diva” “opened up a special sort of world for me.”
“I’m being acknowledged on the road,” she mentioned, “and I simply completed a recording session. It appears I’m getting a bit extra consideration.”
Even so, on that scorching summer season day when she was being interviewed in her South Philadelphia residence, with youngsters exterior splashing in water gushing from open hearth hydrants, she mentioned: “This is my id. I don’t need to faux to be what I’m not.”
