Tony Bennett
Tony Bennett is an actor, born 1926.
Anthony Dominick Benedetto was born in Astoria, Queens, in 1926 and died in 2023, and in between he became one of the finest interpreters of the American songbook. Twenty Grammy Awards, two Primetime Emmys, an NEA Jazz Master title and a Kennedy Center Honor are the official record; more than fifty million records sold is the commercial one.
The screen credits collected here are a singer's rather than an actor's, and that is the interesting thing about them. He is on The Ed Sullivan Show and The Steve Allen Show in the 1950s, co-hosting The Mike Douglas Show, on Carson, on Great Performances, on MTV Unplugged when a much younger audience found him, on Larry King and Rosie O'Donnell, and eventually mentoring on Canadian Idol. Half a century of television, viewed sideways, is the career.
He tried proper acting once. In The Oscar (1966) he plays Hymie Kelly, a real dramatic part in a famously overripe Hollywood melodrama, and he never went back. Afterwards he appeared as himself: Bruce Almighty, Muppets Most Wanted, Muppets Tonight, The Scout, Cosby, plus a character called Tony Lombardi on Evening Shade. The documentaries are where the singing survives on film, Amy (2015) and Quincy (2018) among them.
Off screen he founded the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts in his home neighbourhood, along with the arts education non-profit Exploring the Arts, which is a more durable legacy than most people with twenty Grammys bother to build.
Movies (10)
TV (18)
- The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962)
- The Mike Douglas Show (1961)
- Great Performances (1971)
- CBS News Sunday Morning (1979)
- The Ed Sullivan Show (1948)
- The Steve Allen Show (1956)
- The Celebrity Apprentice (2004)
- Dinah! (1974)
- MTV Unplugged (1989)
- Cosby (1996)
- The Danny Kaye Show (1963)
- Evening Shade (1990)
- Rove (1999)
- Muppets Tonight (1996)
- Canadian Idol (2003)
- The Rosie O'Donnell Show (1996)
- Mundo VIP (1996)
- Larry King Live (1985)
Where to start with Tony Bennett
MTV Unplugged is where to go for Bennett actually singing on camera. That session is the performance which introduced him to an audience three generations younger, and he does not condescend to it for a second.
For the acting, The Oscar is the only real sample: a gloriously overheated Hollywood melodrama in which he plays an actual character, worth seeing as a curiosity rather than a discovery. Amy and Quincy are the documentaries that show what he was like in a studio beside a younger artist, and the first contains the most quietly devastating footage of him anywhere.
Then the light stuff. Bruce Almighty and Muppets Most Wanted use him as a national landmark playing himself, and The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson is where he spent a great deal of his working life.