TE KANAWA, DAME KIRI (JANETTE)

born March 6, 1944, Gisborne, North Island, N.Z. critically acclaimed opera star. When Kiri was five weeks old she was adopted by Tom and Nell Te Kanawa; Tom, like her biological father, was a Maori, and his wife, like Kiri's biological mother, was of British descent. Kiri attended a Roman Catholic girls' college in Auckland, where one of the sisters was a well-known teacher of singing. After leaving school she won various singing competitions in New Zealand and Australia and in 1966, after a period as a popular singer and recording artist, became a student at the London Opera Centre. Soprano Te Kanawa shot to stardom in the 1970s with a series of appearances at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London, and the enthusiastic support of conductors such as Sir Colin Davis and Sir Georg Solti. Her first big success was as the Countess in Mozart's Marriage of Figaro in 1971. That was followed by a run of Mozart operas and, among others, a production of Puccini's La Bohme in which she sang Mimi. Her debut at the Metropolitan Opera, New York City, in 1974 as Desdemona in Verdi's Otello was widely acclaimed. In 1981 the Prince of Wales asked her to sing at his wedding, and her rendering of Handel's Let the Bright Seraphim reached a worldwide television audience of more than 600,000,000. In 1982 Te Kanawa was created a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.