José Carreras (born Josep Maria Carreras Coll, 5 December 1946, in the Sants district of Barcelona) showed an early talent for singing after seeing Mario Lanza in The Great Caruso, and made his stage debut at age 11 in 1958 as the boy-soprano Trujamán in Manuel de Falla’s El retablo de Maese Pedro at Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu. Encouraged by soprano Montserrat Caballé, who invited him to sing opposite her in Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia in 1970, he progressed rapidly through the 1970s, winning Parma’s Voci Verdiane competition and making debuts at the San Francisco Opera, the Vienna Staatsoper, London’s Royal Opera House, the Metropolitan Opera, and La Scala by his late twenties. In 1987, while filming a movie version of La bohème, he was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia and given a 1-in-10 chance of survival; he recovered after chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and a bone marrow transplant in Seattle, and returned to the stage in 1988–89. In 1990 he joined fellow tenors Plácido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti for the first Three Tenors concert in Rome, originally conceived to benefit the leukaemia foundation he had established two years earlier.

Carreras is one of the most celebrated tenors of his era, particularly admired for his performances in the operas of Donizetti, Verdi, and Puccini and for the beauty and expressiveness of his phrasing, in the tradition of his idol Giuseppe di Stefano. As one of the Three Tenors, he helped bring opera to an unprecedented global audience — the 1990 concert recording became, at the time, the best-selling classical album in history, and the 1994 Los Angeles concert was watched by an estimated one billion viewers worldwide. Beyond the stage, his recovery from leukaemia led him to found the José Carreras International Leukaemia Foundation in 1988, which has raised tens of millions of euros for research and patient care and for which he continues to perform benefit concerts — work recognized with honors including the Prince of Asturias Prize for Art and numerous honorary doctorates.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Carreras