Biography

She starred in "Tosca" at Monte Carlo and then sang in Paris. Her co-star at the New York Metropolitan Opera was the great Enrico Caruso. They appeared in "I Fedora" and "Manon Lescaut". Cavalieri became so carried away with Caruso that she once kissed him passionately on stage.

Well into her sixties when World War II began, she nevertheless worked as a volunteer nurse.

In 1915, she returned from France to her native Italy to make motion pictures. When that country became involved in World War I, she went to the United States, where she made four more silent films. The last three of her films were the product of her friend, the film director Edward José. Almost all of her films are considered lost.

In 1904, she sang at the Opéra de Monte-Carlo then in 1905, at the Sarah Bernhardt Theatre in Paris, Cavalieri starred opposite Enrico Caruso in the Umberto Giordano opera Fedora. From there, she and Caruso took the opera to New York City, debuting with it at the Metropolitan Opera on 5 December 1906.

Cavalieri was killed on 7 February 1944 during an Allied bombing raid that destroyed her home in Florence near Poggio Imperiale, where she had been placed under police surveillance because of her foreign husband. Hearing an American bomber nearby, Cavalieri, her husband, and the servants ran to the air-raid shelter in the grounds, but Cavalieri and her husband were delayed because they were collecting her valuable jewellery from the house. Both Cavalieri and her husband were killed running to the air-raid shelter, while the servants inside the shelter all survived.