“The big lesson in life, baby, is never be scared of anyone or anything.” ~Frank Sinatra
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One of the most popular singers in American history Frank Sinatra was also one of the famous actors who performed in fifty-eight films and won an Academy Award for his performance in From Here to Eternity. He was a nominee for the Best Actor for The Man with the Golden Arm, and highly praised and critically acclaimed for his role in The Manchurian Candidate and the recipient of eleven Grammy Awards. In 1985, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by the then president Ronald Reagan and in 1997 the Congressional Gold Medal and many others. He is also known to be the best vocalist of Swing Era.
Frank Sinatra was born on December 12, 1915 in Hoboken, NJ, to Italian immigrants Natalie Della and Antonino Martino Sinatra. His father was a fire-fighter in Hoboken and mother was an amateur singer who would sing occasionally at social events. Sinatra’s childhood wasn’t pleasant and he had developed some bad habits as a teenager. His mother would run an illegal abortion clinic from their home for she was convicted and arrested twice.
Sinatra was expelled from high school for his rowdy behavior and he could never get back to education. He worked as a delivery boy at the Jersey Observer newspaper, as a riveter at the Tietjan and Lang shipyard but music remained his favorite from early childhood years. His first public performance was at the age 8 at a local nightclub in Hoboken. According to Sinatra, he sang for the sole purpose of getting tips.
In 1935, he joined a local singing group, named The Three Flashes, which later became known as the Hoboken Four. Their performance interested an American radio personality Edward Bowes who offered them to perform in American radio’s best-known talent hunt show ‘Major Bowes Amateur Hour’ where they won the first prize receiving 40,000 votes and this led them to a national tour for six month. At the time, he began performing at various nightclubs in New Jersey and in 1939 he started working on radio station WNEW in New York for $75 per week. Later, he joined Tommy Dorsey and his orchestra, which was one of the most popular in the land, where he worked for two years from 1940 to 1942 and it was the time when he performed with the band in his first two movies Las Vegas Nights in 1941 and Ship Ahoy in 1942. After 1942, he started his solo career and became extremely famous.
In 1954, he appeared in the film From Here to Eternity for which he won an Academy Award for best supporting actor. In coming years, he appeared in several movies including Guys and Dolls in 1955, Young At Heart, The Man With the Golden Arm and The Tender Trap in 1955, and High Society in 1956 and many others.
In 1998, he died of a heart attack at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and was buried next to his parents in the Desert Memorial Park in Cathedral City.
Info Source: wikipedia.org
