Frank Sinatra

Actor | Singer - Born Francis Albert Sinatra on Dec. 12, 1915 in Hoboken, NJ - Died May 14, 1998 of heart attack in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center [formerly Cedars of Lebanon Hospital], CA

Frank Sinatra was a talented and temperamental balladeer who dominated popular music longer than any entertainer before him and clung to his legendary life as tenaciously as he had stuck with the audiences he loved.

Sinatra's masterful interpretation and flawless execution of some of America's most beloved songs earned his reputation as the most influential popular singer of the 20th century. His accomplishments broadened to include film, with such roles as his Academy Award-winning performance in "From Here to Eternity."

For more than three generations, his name was synonymous with talent and taste. In the late 1930s, his fragile frame and painfully shy expressions made swooning, shrieking fools of the normally normal teenage girls standing by the bandstands where he first earned his living at $75 a week. In the 1960s he gathered in millions as both partner and star in the clubs of Las Vegas.

Sinatra had good cause to be angry from the moment he entered the world Dec. 12, 1915. He was a 13-pound baby, and birth was difficult. He was to bear on his neck the rest of his life the scars of the doctor's forceps.

The doctor concluded that the baby was lost and concentrated on saving the mother, Natalie "Dolly" Sinatra, a nurse and midwife. But the grandmother, Rosa Garavanti, picked up the newborn child and held him under a cold water tap until he began to choke and cry — and breathe.

— Burt A. Folkart in the Los Angeles Times May 16, 1998