Singer-actor Tony Martin dies at 98
BY LOS ANGELES TIMES
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Tony Martin, the last of
the big-name singer-actors
from the golden age of Hollywood
musicals, has died.
He was 98.
Martin, who toured for
years with his wife, danceractress
Cyd Charisse, died
of natural
causes
Friday at
his home
in Los Angeles,
his longtime business
manager, Stan Schneider,
told the Los Angeles Times.
He appeared in more than
30 films, most memorably
as a thief at odds with Peter
Lorre’s inspector in 1948’s
stylish “Casbah,” one of the
many movie musicals that
helped turn Martin into a
star.
Twice, songs sung on
screen by Martin received
Academy Award nominations:
“For Every Man
There’s a Woman” from
“Casbah” and “It’s a Blue
World” from the 1940 film
“Music in My Heart.”
He endured as a crooner
of romantic ballads, continuing
to belt them out on
stage well into his 90s.
With his powerful voice
and beguiling style, Martin
was enormously popular
from the late 1930s through
the 1950s as a singer who
helped make standards out
of such tunes as “Stranger
in Paradise,” “La Vie en
Rose,” “Fools Rush In,” “I’ll
See You in My Dreams” and
many others.
Although dozens of singers
recorded Cole Porter’s
“Begin the Beguine,” Martin
was so identified with it that
former Times jazz critic
Leonard Feather once described
the song as Martin’s
“virtual mirror image.”
“Martin reminds you of
that era when hearts were
worn on sleeves,” Feather
wrote in a 1970 Times review
of a local nightclub
performance.
By the early 1960s, movie
musicals and his singing career
had crested, and he began
touring with Charisse in
a cabaret act. He pulled from
a treasury of songs that included “
I Get Ideas” and “It’s
Magic,” and his wife danced.
The couple marked 60
years of marriage in 2008,
the year she died at 86. A
bereft Martin, then 94, dealt
with his grief by continuing
to perform live, he later said.
Being onstage made him
feel young again, he said.
As he marked only his
50th year in show business,
in 1981, he paused during a
week of shows in a New York
club to ask: “What am I going
to do? Sit in Beverly Hills
and watch the clouds go by?”
Associated Images:
Tony Martin sings at the Cocoanut Grove night club at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Martin appeared in movie musicals from the 1930s to the 1950s and sustained a career in records, television and nightclubs from the Depression era into the 21st century. ASSOCIATED PRESS FILE
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