This is so sad…

I always associated this singer with my father, who also passed away (but in December 1999).  My father had the most beautiful voice (as does my mother) but he also had perfect pitch.

While I can certainly carry a tune,  some times better than at other times, I am no singer…. as much as I would love to be… My father, on the other hand, (whose love affair with cars started as a young boy and never really ended (he was a car mechanic who always smelt of gas, a smell I associate with him and love to this day)), was a perfect singer.

 That scene in the movie, AMADEUS, where Mozart hears the music Salieri plays from the garden, just once, and then replays it (and even improves upon it) was something I would never have believed had my own father not had the same gift.  I used to think it was some kind of parlour trick but my father was was never errant.  I’d hum random bars and he was able to repeat them without a single error the first time around on a guitar, a piano, an organ, a harmonica, an accordion, you name it…

And, all to say, we used to have a grand old time, when he would sing like Bob Goulet.  He would imitate him perfectly (even better!)…

 Ah, my father, I miss him so…

And now the death of Robert Goulet, (whose dining room set, I think we once purchased from his parents or something), is yet another piece of the tangibles that created memories of my father that is now gone from this earth.

 Rest in Peace, Mr. Goulet.  If there is a heaven, I hope you get to meet my dad and have a little duet or two… You are sure to entertain everyone around, although, hey, my dad can still outsing you, as good as you are.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/obit_robert_goulet

 Singer Robert Goulet dies at 73

AP Photo: Singer Robert Goulet performs prior to the Boston Red Sox home opener in Boston in…

By DAISY NGUYEN,

Associated Press Writer

6 minutes ago

LOS ANGELES – Robert Goulet, the handsome, big-voiced baritone whose Broadway debut in “Camelot” launched an award-winning stage and recording career, has died. He was 73.

The singer died Tuesday morning in a Los Angeles hospital while awaiting a lung transplant, said Goulet spokesman Norm Johnson.

He had been awaiting a lung transplant at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles after being found last month to have a rare form of pulmonary fibrosis.

Goulet had remained in good spirits even as he waited for the transplant, said Vera Goulet, his wife of 25 years.

“Just watch my vocal cords,” she said he told doctors before they inserted a breathing tube.

The Massachusetts-born Goulet, who spent much of his youth in Canada, gained stardom in 1960 with “Camelot,” the Lerner and Loewe musical that starred Richard Burton as King Arthur and Julie Andrews as his Queen Guenevere.

Goulet played Sir Lancelot, the arrogant French knight who falls in love with Guenevere.

He became a hit with American TV viewers with appearances on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and other programs. Sullivan labeled him the “American baritone from Canada,” where he had already been a popular star in the 1950s, hosting his own TV show called “General Electric’s Showtime.”

The Los Angeles Times wrote in 1963 that Goulet “is popping up in specials so often these days that you almost feel he has a weekly show. The handsome lad is about the hottest item in show business since his Broadway debut.”

Goulet won a Grammy Award in 1962 as best new artist and made the singles chart in 1964 with “My Love Forgive Me.”

“When I’m using a microphone or doing recordings I try to concentrate on the emotional content of the song and to forget about the voice itself,” he told The New York Times in 1962.

“Sometimes I think that if you sing with a big voice, the people in the audience don’t listen to the words, as they should,” he told the paper. “They just listen to the sound.”

While he returned to Broadway only infrequently after “Camelot,” he did win a Tony award in 1968 for best actor in a musical for his role in “The Happy Time.” His other Broadway appearances were in “Moon Over Buffalo” in 1995 and “La Cage aux Folles” in 2005, plus a “Camelot” revival in 1993 in which he played King Arthur.

His stage credits elsewhere include productions of “Carousel,” “Finian’s Rainbow,” “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” “The Pajama Game,” “Meet Me in St. Louis,” and “South Pacific.”

Goulet also got some film work, performing in movies ranging from the animated “Gay Purr-ee” (1962) to “Underground” (1970) to “The Naked Gun 2 1/2″ (1991). He played a lounge singer in Louis Malle’s acclaimed 1980 film “Atlantic City.”

He returned to Broadway in 2005 as one half of a gay couple in “La Cage aux Folles,” and Associated Press theater critic Michael Kuchwara praised Goulet for his “affable, self-deprecating charm.”

Goulet had no problems poking fun at his own fame, appearing recently in an Emerald nuts commercial in which he “messes” with the stuff of dozing office workers, and lending his name to Goulet’s SnoozeBars. Goulet also has been sent up by Will Ferrell on “Saturday Night Live.”

“You have to have humor and be able to laugh at yourself,” Goulet said in a biography on his Web site.

The only son of French-Canadian parents, Goulet was born in Lawrence, Mass. After his father died, his mother moved the family to Canada when the future star was about 13.

He received vocal training at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto but decided opera wasn’t for him. He made his first professional appearance at age 16 with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra. His early success on Canadian television preceded his breakthrough on Broadway.

When his onetime costar Julie Andrews received a Kennedy Center Honors award in 2001, Goulet was among those joining in singing in her honor.

In his last performance Sept. 20 in Syracuse, N.Y., the crooner was backed by a 15-piece orchestra as he performed the one-man show “A Man and his Music.”

Although Goulet headlined frequently on the Las Vegas Strip, one period stood out, evidenced by a photograph that hung on his office wall. It was the mid-1970s, and he had just finished a two-week run at the Desert Inn when he was asked to fill in at the Frontier, across the street.

Overnight, the marquees of two of the Strip’s hottest resorts read the same: “Robert Goulet.”

“I played there many, many years and have wonderful memories of the place,” Goulet told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

His first two marriages ended in divorce. He had a daughter with his first wife, Louise Longmore, and two sons with his second wife, Carol Lawrence, the actress and singer who played Maria in the original Broadway production of “West Side Story.”

After their breakup, she portrayed him unflatteringly in a book. “There’s a fine line between love and hate,” he responded in a New York Times interview. “She went on every talk show interview and cut me to shreds, and I’ve never done anything like that, and I won’t.”

___

Associated Press writer Ryan Nakashima in Las Vegas contributed to this report.

___

On the Net:

http://www.robertgoulet.com

Well, with regard to the article reproduced below, this is sad news if true, but maybe he is just saying that?  Of course, he does make a good point about the box office attraction factor, so maybe it is true after all…

I don’t know if I would go see the movie as I haven’t seen all of the Star Trek movies and have been disappointed somewhat in the ones I did see, but I have always been glad to revisit ‘old friends’… I LOVED the original Star Trek series (skipped over the NextGeneration (out of principle, after seeing the first episode and how they were trying to make all the Star Trek features fancier than the original, like the way they ’beamed up’ people etc.) but really got into it when, around its fifth season, I happened upon an episode which got me hooked (and one in particular I remember about an empath who literally sucked the life force out of the women he was around (i.e., a great metaphor to those who never really learn to be responsible for themselves but find every excuse to use and abuse other people’s time and energy to feed their own bottomless pit of needs)…and, then, of course, there was the one with Janeway and Chicoté… I had a wicked crush on Chicoté (or however it is spelt) with his heritage tattooed on the side of his face… In fact, I got to care about all the characters.. Hmm, but I don’t LOOK like a geek. Honest! Ha!

So, anyway, back to Captain Kirk… I loved the way HE looked but I loved the cool logic of Mr. Spock with his less passionate way of expressing himself (which , for some reason, convinced my young mind that he was equally if not MORE passionate and emotional than the good old Captain but he was able to contain it (which made his character smolderingly sexy for me)… But I liked the look and the build and the take-charge personality of the Captain… That he had to kiss every woman in sight in EVERY episode, human and alien alike, was a bit much, even for my young mind, but, mmmm, that guy had something very attractive…

PLUS, as I found out in later years, he is originally from Montreal… Since I don’t own cable (what’s the point of having and paying for 100 useless channels to watch when you get about 20 of them for free?), I never got to see TJ HOOKER or any of the others that William Shatner has starred in, and neither, as a result, have I ever watched a single episode of Boston Legal…., so I have nothing to taint or to meld with of his character of Captain Kirk… As such, he remains a strong figure in my memory, someone I really enjoyed… I wonder, though, if I would if he were a real person… Regardless the packaging, I would probably go for Mr. Spock — well, Mr. Spock with a good dose of the compassionate Bones and the (other Canadian) resourceful Scotty.

Now, if only those three were all in the same person, including Kirk!…  I wonder how many other young girls thought that and how many young boys aspired to be like any one of them… better role models than the teletubbies etc, yes?  The whole premise of Star Trek was a terrific one (where all people of all colours and all nations could work together and it wasn’t even an issue…- a lesson for us all…)

Anyway, I wonder if this thing about Kirk not being in the movie is just a ruse?

Maybe, Shatner will be in the movie anyway and J.J. Abrams is counting on the box office drawing power of everything else to ‘give’ us the surprise of Kirk in the movie (but, that cat would be out of the bag after the first night of opening, so, gee, I don’t know, unless he is thinking that once the word gets out, even MORE people will want to go see it… Who knows…)

http://movies.yahoo.com/mv/news/ap/20071026/119343720000.html

  Shatner’s Kirk Not Aboard for New ‘Trek’
Friday October 26 3:20 PM ETThe original Capt. Kirk is disheartened he won’t get to boldly go anywhere with his old pal Spock in the new “Star Trek” movie. While Leonard Nimoy is reprising his role as the pointy-eared Vulcan in next year’s science-fiction flick, William Shatner is not on board as Kirk.

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