Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez, 75, soprano who starred in ‘Diva’
Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez, an American soprano who had recently established herself as an opera singer in real life when she was cast by a French director to play one on-screen in the 1981 movie “Diva,” a cult film that lodged her in the memory of generations of art house audiences, died Feb. 2 at her home in Lexington, Kentucky. She was 75.
The cause was cancer, said her daughter, Sheena Fernandez.
Fernandez made her vocal debut at age 7 when, by her account, her grandmother put her before the congregation of their Baptist church in Philadelphia and told her to “sing for the people.” She went on to study at the Juilliard School in New York before entering the professional opera world in the late 1970s as one of its relatively few Black singers.
African-American stars such as Leontyne Price, Shirley Verrett and Grace Bumbry had achieved major international careers before Fernandez embarked on hers. But obstacles and indignities remained.
When she presented herself for auditions, Fernandez once told The
Washington Post, she detected what she described as “the little falling of the face,” which to her signaled that “we would like you to do the role, but you’re Black.”
“I wished I could sing behind a screen and just be judged on my voice,” Fernandez said.
She was singing in churches in Philadelphia in the late 1970s when a friend encouraged her to try out for a Houston Grand Opera touring production of “Porgy and Bess,” the Gershwin opera set in the fictional Black community of Catfish Row in Charleston, South Carolina. Hired to sing in the chorus, she quickly was promoted to play Bess.
While touring with the production in Europe, she won a contract with the Paris Opera, where she attracted the notice of film director Jean-Jacques Beineix. Beineix was at work on his debut feature, a thriller whose plot centered on an American opera star. He decided that Fernandez was the person to play her.
At first Fernandez was unsure. “I don’t quite believe in filmed performance; it seems to me it should be real flesh and blood,” she later told the Miami Herald.
But she ultimately agreed, and her initial reluctance perhaps contributed to the verisimilitude of her performance as Cynthia Hawkins, the fictional title character of “Diva,” who bedazzles Paris and bewitches a young French postal messenger named Jules (Frederic Andrei).
Cynthia’s defining trait is that she refuses to consent to recordings. Only in the presence of an audience, amid the emotional exchange between performer and listener, does she believe her artistry can emerge. Jules, obsessed, sneaks a tape recorder into one of her concerts, bootlegs a recording of her singing “Ebben? Ne andrò lontana,” the signature soprano aria from Alfredo Catalani’s opera “La Wally,” and steals the white gown she had worn onstage.
Wilhelmenia Wiggins was born in Philadelphia on Jan. 5, 1949. Her mother played the piano and the church organ.
Wilhelmenia was a teenager when she saw her first opera, “Carmen.” In an interview years later with the Lexington Herald Leader, she recalled thinking, “That’s what my voice can do. Now, I know where my energies can be channeled.”
She studied at the Settlement Music School in Philadelphia and at the Philadelphia Academy of Vocal Arts before receiving a scholarship to attend Juilliard. She was married to Ormond Fernandez in the early 1970s and left Juilliard shortly before graduating to care for their daughter.
Fernandez’s first marriage ended in divorce. In 2001, she married Andrew W. Smith, an operatic baritone who had performed with her in “Porgy and Bess.”
Fernandez returned to college and, in 2007, received a bachelor’s degree in music from the University of Kentucky, followed by a master’s degree in special education from Georgetown College in Georgetown, Kentucky, in 2013. Until shortly before her death, she worked as a special-education teacher at a Lexington elementary school.
Fernandez’s husband died in 2018. Her daughter, of Atlanta, was her only immediate survivor.