Celebrity Name : Tony Bennett

Celebrity Real Name : Anthony Benedetto

Date of Birth : August 3, 1926

Birth Location : Astoria, Queens, New York City, United States

Tony Bennett Biography :
Tony Bennett (born Anthony Dominick Benedetto on August 3, 1926) is an American popular music, standards, and jazz singer who is widely considered to be one of the best interpretative singers in these genres.
After having achieved artistic and commercial success in the 1950s and early 1960s, his career suffered an extended downturn during the height of the rock music era. However, Bennett staged a remarkable comeback in the late 1980s and 1990s, expanding his audience to a younger generation while keeping his musical style intact. He remains a popular and critically praised recording artist and concert performer in the 2000s.
Tony Bennett is also a serious and accomplished painter.

First successes :
Warned by Miller not to imitate Frank Sinatra (who was just then leaving Columbia), Bennett began his career as a crooner singing commercial pop tunes. His first big hit was “Because of You”, a ballad produced by Miller with a lush orchestral arrangement from Percy Faith. It started out gaining popularity on jukeboxes, then reached #1 on the pop charts in 1951 and stayed there for 10 weeks, selling over a million copies. This was followed to the top later that year by a similarly-styled rendition of Hank Williams’ “Cold, Cold Heart”, which helped introduce Williams and country music in general to a wider, more national audience. The Miller and Faith tandem continued to work on all of Bennett’s early hits. Bennett’s recording of “Blue Velvet” was also very popular and attracted screaming teenage fans at concerts in the famed Paramount Theatre in New York (Bennett did 7 shows a day, starting at 10:30 a.m.) and elsewhere.

Books :
Bennett, Tony. Tony Bennett : What My Heart Has Seen. Rizzoli,
1996. ISBN 0-8478-1972-8.
Bennett, Tony, with Will Friedwald. The Good Life: The Autobiography Of Tony Bennett. Pocket Books, 1998. ISBN 0-671-02469-8. [wikipredia]