Raffaella Carrà, the pop singer and actor who was an entertainment icon in her native Italy, has died aged 78.
Her long-term partner, Sergio Japino, announced her death, saying: “Raffaella has left us. She has gone to a better world, where her humanity, her unmistakable laugh and her extraordinary talent will shine for ever.” He said she had been battling an illness, which he did not name, for some time.
Carrà is best known in the UK for her single Do It, Do It Again, which reached No 9 in 1978 and spent 12 weeks on the chart. She enjoyed much greater success in Italy, where she was described in 1984 by magazine l’Espresso as: “More applauded than [president] Pertini, more expensive than [football player] Michel Platini, more miraculous than [modern saint] Padre Pio.”
Born in Bologna in 1943, Carrà studied dance, and first became an actor in the “peplum” genre of Italian historical epic films. Buoyed by her success, she moved to the US and acted opposite Frank Sinatra and others in Von Ryan’s Express (1965), but soon returned to Italy and became a host on television variety show Canzonissima, which frequently featured song-and-dance numbers performed by her.
Her outfits and routines were regarded as racy by the era’s standards and she was occasionally censored, but her career endured throughout the 1970s. She also became hugely popular in Spain with another variety show, La Hora de Raffaella, and in South America after moving to Buenos Aires in 1979.
She was a gay icon across Europe, and became regarded as a feminist icon, too: in its original Italian version, Do It, Do It Again encourages women to take control during sex. “I think Raffaella Carrà has done more to liberate women than many feminists,” said Francesco Vezzoli, curator of an exhibition of 1970s Italian television for Fondazione Prada in 2017.
Carrà returned to Italian television once more in 1983 with Pronto, Raffaella?, and continued her TV career until 2019, including as a stint as a judge on the Italian edition of The Voice. A Spanish musical film based around her songs, Explota Explota, was released in 2020.
She made 25 studio albums during her career, most recently Ogni Volta Che è Natale in 2018.
• This article was amended on 6 July 2021. In an earlier version the surname of Raffaella Carrà’s partner, Sergio Japino, was given as Iapino, which is his birth name but not the one he goes by.
