Actors - Frank Sinatra

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	Actors - Frank Sinatra

Francis Albert Sinatra (December 12, 1915 – May 14, 1998) was an American singer who is considered by many to have been the finest male popular song vocalist of all time. Renowned for his impeccable phrasing and timing, many critics place him alongside artists such as Bing Crosby, Elvis Presley and The Beatles as one of the most important popular and influential music figures of the 20th century. Sinatra launched a second career as a dramatic film actor, and became admired for a screen persona distinctly tougher than his smooth singing style. Sinatra also had a larger-than-life presence in the public eye, and as "The Chairman of the Board" became an American icon, known for his brash, sometimes swaggering attitude, as embodied by his signature song "My Way".

Life

Early life

He was born in Hoboken, New Jersey. He was the only child of quiet Sicilian fireman father, Anthony Martin Sinatra (1894-1969). Anthony had emigrated to the United States in 1895. His mother, Natalie Della Gavarante (1896-1977), was a talented, tempestuous Ligurian, who worked as a part-time abortionist. She was known as "Dolly", and emigrated in 1897. Although it is part of the Sinatra folklore that Frank had an impoverished childhood, he was actually brought up in middle-class surroundings, due to his father's secure job as a fireman, and his mother's strong political ties in Hoboken.

Career

Frank Sinatra decided to become a singer after hearing Bing Crosby on the radio. He began singing in small clubs in New Jersey and eventually attracted the attention of trumpeter and band-leader Harry James.

After a brief stint with James, he joined the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra in 1940 where he rose to fame as a singer. His vast appeal to the "bobby soxers", as teenage girls were called, revealed a whole new audience for popular music, which had appealed mainly to adults up to that time. (The complete span of his career with Dorsey was released in the 1994 box set The Song Is You.) It was as a featured singer with Dorsey that Sinatra made his earliest film appearances, such as the 1942 Eleanor Powell/Red Skelton comedy, Ship Ahoy
in which the uncredited singer performed a couple of songs.

He later signed with Columbia Records as a solo artist with some success, particularly during the musicians' recording strikes. Vocalists were not part of the musician union and were allowed to record during the ban by using a cappella vocal backing.

Of this first phase of Sinatra's career, it can be said that it anticipated virtually every phase of what, in the 1960s, would be called "the youth movement." His sudden--and for many his alarming--appeal to teen-agers became a topic of journalistic and even sociological comment. Subsequent musical idols would pass through the same stages of massive initial appeal, decline, and retrenchment. Few, however, would manage, as Sinatra did--and as became essential to any popular music career that aspired to longevity--to generate new audiences, as Sinatra did in the 1950s and repeatedly into even the final decade of his career.

Sinatra's singing career was in decline in the late 1940s and early 1950s, a period when novelty tunes became popular with audiences and during which Sinatra's aging would cause some loss of appeal to new teen-age audiences. Nor was his career helped by the bad publicity that comebacks in the history of American show business, Sinatra would succeed not merely in reestablishing his popularity but in taking it far beyond what he had achieved in the 1940s. This renewal would come about not in the recording studio but in Hollywood.

Sinatra had begun appearing in movies in the early 1940s, but usually in musicals, often undistinguished ones. He also appeared on a weekly television show on CBS for two years from 1950-1952 (and would try again for one year on ABC from 1957-1958).

What might be called Sinatra's second career began as a full-fledged dramatic actor when he played the scrappy Pvt. Angelo Maggio in the eve-of-Pearl Harbor drama From Here to Eternity
(1953), for which he won a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award. This role and performance became legendary at the time as the key comeback moment in Sinatra's career. Virtually overnight, his career had recovered.

The following year, Sinatra played a crazed, coldblooded assassin determined to kill the President in the thriller Suddenly (available freely online ); critics found Sinatra's performance one of the most chilling portrayals of a psychopath ever committed to film. This was followed in 1955 by his portrayal of a heroin addict in 1955's The Man with the Golden Arm
, for which he received an Academy Award Best Actor nomination.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Frank Sinatra ]

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Actors - Frank Sinatra

Life

Early life

Career

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