Frank Sinatra

Frank Sinatra invented the modern popular singer, lost his voice and his contract at thirty-five, and won an Academy Award that restarted everything. He was the only child of Sicilian immigrants in Hoboken, New Jersey, and learned to sing from records and from watching Bing Crosby. With the Tommy Dorsey band from 1940 he studied the trombonist's breathing and built a legato phrasing no crooner had used; the bobby-soxer riots at the Paramount in 1942 are the first modern instance of that kind of fan hysteria. By 1950 his voice had haemorrhaged, his marriage had collapsed publicly over Ava Gardner, and Columbia and MCA had both dropped him. He took the part of Maggio in From Here to Eternity for a fraction of his old fee, won the supporting-actor Oscar in 1954, and then made the Capitol albums with Nelson Riddle - In the Wee Small Hours, Songs for Swingin' Lovers - that are the reason he is taken seriously as an artist. He campaigned for Roosevelt and Kennedy, made an anti-racism short film in 1945, insisted on integrated hotels for his musicians, and had documented associations with organised crime figures that the FBI pursued for decades without charging him. He founded Reprise Records in 1960 so that he would own his own master recordings, which was unusual for a performer then. The Rat Pack films and Las Vegas engagements with Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr belong to the early 1960s, as does the kidnapping of his son Frank Jr, recovered after a ransom was paid. He supported Kennedy and then moved to Reagan, who gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1985. He announced his retirement in 1971 and returned two years later. New York, New York, recorded in 1979 when he was sixty-three, became the song he could not leave a stage without.

• Lived: 1915 CE – 1998 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: artist