Tony Martin and Cyd Charisse
Actor Tony Martin, right, with his wife Cyd Charisse in 2001. (Long Photography / July 30, 2012)



TonyMartin, 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, dancer-actress Cyd Charisse, died of natural causes Friday at his home in Los Angeles, his longtime business manager, Stan Schneider, told The 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 onstage 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  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  review of a local nightclub performance. "He lets all the emotions hang out, rising to a triplet-backed crescendo on 'For Once in My Life' and singing 'I Am in Love' as if addressing it to Rita Hayworth in a tight close-up," a reference to the glamorous stars with whom he shared the silver screen — and regularly escorted around town.
His tenor voice won him roles in such 1936 movie musicals as "Pigskin Parade" with Judy Garland andBetty Grable and the riverboat saga "Banjo on My Knee" with Barbara Stanwyck. He also co-starred in 1941's extravagantly choreographed "Ziegfeld Girl," serenading Garland, Hedy Lamarr and Lana Turner with "You Stepped Out of a Dream."

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.
"To him, walking out on to a nightclub floor is as simple and natural as going to the kitchen for a glass of water," Charisse said in "The Two of Us," the joint autobiography she wrote with Martin in 1976.
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.
Although he was no longer a belter, the rich timbre of his voice was "surprisingly unchanged from what it was in the 1940s and '50s," according to a 2009 New York Times review during a five-night engagement at a New York City nightclub.
Cued by his pianist, the 95-year-old Martin sang "perfectly recollected versions" of songs associated with such contemporaries as Bing Crosby ("I Surrender, Dear") and "There's No Tomorrow," which Martin said was given to him by Perry Como, according to the review.
Martin viewed his performing style as heartfelt, telling The Times in 1960: "I think I sound like a fella who's always making a plea through his music. Sort of a plea of sincerity."
He was born Alvin Morris on Dec. 25, 1913, in San Francisco, according to birth records. His parents, Edward and Hattie Morris, were Jewish immigrants from Poland who divorced when he was young, and he considered his stepfather, tailor Myer Myers, his father.