Irma Capece Minutolo, opera singer and partner of Exiled King, dies at 87

Irma Capece Minutolo, a Neapolitan beauty queen and opera singer whose relationship with the exiled Egyptian king and world-renowned hedonist Farouk I became fodder for gossip columnists around the world, died June 7 at her home in Rome. She turned 87.

Her death was confirmed by a cousin, Irma Capece Minutolo.

Mrs. Capece Minutolo was a teenager from Naples in the early 1950s when she first met Farouk, who fled to Italyalong with other members of his family, on his royal yacht after a military coup in 1952.

During his reign, “he had such exorbitant tastes”, read his obituary in The New York Times, “and so little regard for his public image in a poor country that he soon became known as a wolf, a glutton and a carefree gambler.”

He took that appetite to Italy. “The name of this chubby monarch with the sweeping moustache had become synonymous with international playboy,” The Times noted. He died at the age of 45 of a heart attack during a midnight meal at a French restaurant in Rome in 1965.

Accounts of how the pair met vary and are often filtered by the gossip standards of the day. According to “Farouk: Uncensored,” a 1965 pulpy narrator by a journalist named Michael Stern, Farouk fell under the spell of Mrs. Capece Minutolo during a beauty pageant and shouted “Fraud!” when she did not place, before arranging a meeting. (She was already crowned by then Miss Naples of 1953.)

In an email, her niece disputed that and other accounts, saying that Mrs. Capece Minutolo, aged 16, had been chosen to welcome Farouk with a bouquet of flowers when he arrived in Naples in 1952 and that they met in Circolo Canottieri, an exclusive club in Naples that her father was a member of.

Her social status also became a question. Born in Naples on August 6, 1935, Mrs. Capece Minutolo was often referred to in the news media as a princess or marchioness, and the venerable L’Annuario della Nobiltà Italiana (The Yearbook of Italian Nobility) lists her as a descendant of Neapolitan princes.

However, in 1954, when rumors of an impending marriage spread, she sued two Italian journalists who reported that her parents were driver and the daughter of a janitor. “During the reporters’ trial for defamation,” Time magazine reported at the time, “Irma’s father had complained indignantly, ‘To doubt my daughter’s aristocratic parentage is to slander the father of Farouk’s betrothed, whose marriage is imminent. ‘” (The resolution of the lawsuit is unclear.)

Her niece said Mrs. Capece Minutolo’s father was Prince Augusto, who owned a luxury car dealership.

Another open question was whether a marriage was indeed imminent. At the time of the lawsuit Time quoted Mrs. Capece Minutolo said: “I prefer not to get married. Farouk is wise and tender, but marriage is the tomb of love.”

But she later said that they were married in 1958 in an Islamic ceremony. Ms Capece Minutolo attended Farouk’s funeral along with his first wife, Queen Farida, although the British newspaper The Telegraph reported that she was not named in the former monarch’s will. She was usually described as his companion in news media reports.

In the early years, their relationship was compared to George Bernard Shaw’s play, “Pygmalion,” or perhaps “My Fair Lady,” with stories of Farouk sending her to school, giving her restyled and money-making singing lessons. “It was a perfect match between an Eliza Doolittle and a Henry Higgins,” wrote Mr. Stern.

The singing lessons paid off in the early 1960s, when Farouk arranged her debut performance at a black-tie recital of arias at an art club in Naples. Less than a minute after she launched into her first aria, from Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly,” the lights went out. “A few women started screaming,” The Boston Globe recalled in a 1969 article. “A lot of the men howled with laughter.”

Soon candles came from a church next door so she could finish the set with their flashes of light. It was a good idea, except the performance was interrupted again when a candle set fire to the pianist’s sheet music.

Mrs. Capece Minutolo became a punchline, adding to her notoriety as the girlfriend of a king whose compatriots had found him “dissolute and monumentally greedy,” as The Times put it.

“The public thought of me as a silly sex pot with no talent,” she told The Globe.

But the disastrous debut turned out to be no death knell for her dreams. After Farouk died, Mrs. Capece Minutolo moved into a small apartment and returned to her singing lessons. By the end of the decade she had built a career and received acclaim for many performances, including Verdi’s “Il trovatore” in Rome and a production of Puccini’s “Gianni Schicchi”, directed by the famous Italian baritone Tito Gobbi, in Florence.

She also appeared in a handful of films, including Franco Zeffirelli’s “The Young Toscanini” (1988), starring Elizabeth Taylor, and later ran a singing school in Rome.

Mrs. Capece Minutolo had no direct survivors.

Perhaps no performance was more redemptive for her career than a performance in the late 1960s at an opera house in Parma, known according to The Globe as the “lion’s den” for its relentless hecklers.

“Audiences, primed by her previous publicity as Farouk’s maid, had come to the theater crammed full of bear,” The Globe wrote. “But Irma fooled them all. One fan even shouted from the stands, ‘First of all, you sing great. Second, you are beautiful.’”