Perry Como obituary in “The Guardian” in 2001.

Perry Como Who has died aged 88, was one of a group of early 1940s singers, led by Frank Sinatra, who forsook the big bands and set out on solo careers. Along with Sinatra and Bing Crosby, he became one of America’s leading crooners. 

During a career spanning more than 60 years, he sold more than 50m records, appeared in three musicals, starred in his own million-dollar TV series and won a string of Grammy and Emmy awards. 

Born into a large Italian-American family in the small steel town of Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, Como, the town barber, had no suspicion that he would eventually become a world-famous singer. The barber’s shop was his own, and his use of a pleasing baritone voice was strictly a part-time indulgence. The landscape changed abruptly in 1933, when he was hired by Freddie Carlone’s local touring band. 

Singers at this time were still struggling to escape from the naivete of the 1920s, and Como told me an anecdote to prove the point. Like most vocalists of the period, he was as attached to his megaphone as a baby to it’s dummy. Advertisement

When Carlone introduced him to the mysteries of the new-fangled microphone, he found it impossible to dispense with his beloved megaphone. “I finally hit on a compromise,” he said. “I sang into the microphone through the megaphone”. After three years with Carlone, Como was appearing with the band in a Ohio gambling casino when he was spotted by one of the customers, the bandleader Ted Weems. 

After watching the singer taking countless encores, Weems offered him a job. Como accepted and stayed for six years, perfectly well aware that, in the judgment of a connoisseur, the Weems orchestra was little more than a joke. The band dispensed novelty effects, which included a great deal of whistling, yodelling and barber-shop sentimentality, and never came remotely close to the great bands of the day. It says a great deal about Como that he should have spent so many happy years with a group of which a critic once said, “They sound run-of-the-mill, that is to say, like they’re running a mill.” 

With the entry of the United States into the second world war in 1941, and the drafting of thousands of musicians, the balance between singer and bandleader began to change. Young men who sang with the big bands began to strike out on their own. Led by the example of Sinatra, most of these artists enjoyed some degree of success. Como took the plunge in 1942, and, so instantaneous was his advance, that within two years he had signed a Hollywood contract. 

He starred in three film musicals with Carmen Miranda, though the best that can be said is that each was worse than the others. He was stiff and ungainly in his movements, and so laid back that he seemed always about to slump into unconsciousness. Later, this apparantly casual style, along with his cardigans, became Como’s most famous trademark. 

It was conspicuously on show, for example, when he and I conducted a televised conversation in his London hotel. Being only marginally less laid back than Como, I picked up his mood, at which Bill Cotton Jr, who was running the BBC network at the time, said out loud, “If this goes on much longer, they’ll both be fast asleep”. But we stayed awake long enough to trace Como’s life and times. 

The BBC, with startling originality, called the show The Barber Comes to Town. C omo’s leap to superstardom came in 1946, when he starred in America on the cigarette-sponsored Chesterfield Radio Hour, followed, two years later, by the television version, the Chesterfield Supper Club. He now settled down to the lucrative job of selling cigarettes, in harness with Sinatra, who was doing the same for the opposition, Lucky Strike. 

A year before the Chesterfield connection, he had a million-selling record with Till The End Of Time, quickly followed by another hit, When You Were Sweet Sixteen, then Hot Diggity and Papa Loves Mambo. Although his records all went into the American charts, a much wider fame came in 1950 with his pioneering of the TV music show, on which Como both hosted and sang. Gone were the arthritic movements and the robotic dialogue. 

Instead, viewers saw a relaxed, smiling man brimming with humour. For the next eight years, the Perry Como Show became one of the most popular series on both American and British television, with thousands of fans waiting eagerly through the week to see who the next songwriter guest would be. 

He won an Emmy in 1956 and 1957 for the most outstanding television personality. His silken delivery – a touch too bland sometimes for its own good – was always ideal for sentimental ballads, although it was not too effective on up-tempo pieces that demanded more rhythmic animation. Como’s method of learning a new song never changed. He would retire to a rowing boat on the lake on his estate, armed with a tape of the new song. He would then try to catch a few fish while playing the tape over and over until he was ready to record it. 

Although the advent of rock ‘n’ roll pushed the crooners out of the limelight, he had more hits in the 1970s with It’s Impossible and And I Love You So. Catch A Falling Star, one of his biggest-selling records – for which he had won a Grammy in 1958, and the song for which he was best known – enjoyed a revival as the soundtrack of the 1993 Clint Eastwood film, A Perfect World. Como was widely regarded as a man whose temperament was as smooth as his vocal style, but the reputation for being squeaky-clean could irritate him. 

When we talked, he would launch into some anecdote showing him quite capable of promiscuity if the challenge faced him. Presumably, he was trying to persuade people to amend their view, but, for all his efforts to be interesting, there was probably less to him than met the eye. 

A thoroughly decent, amiable, relaxed character with a sublimely beautiful voice, he was a persuasive argument for the theory that it is possible for a man to become a world celebrity without mislaying his composure. His wife, Roselle, whom he married in 1933, died in 1998. He is survived by his three children. 

• Pierino ‘Perry’ Como, entertainer, born May 18 1912; died May 12 2001