Crooner Tony Martin, whose career spanned from the Great Depression to the 21st century, has died in Los Angeles at 98.

He’s the ultimate crooner who outlasted all his contemporaries

Friend and accountant Beverly Scott said Mr Martin died of natural causes at his home.

The singer’s hit recordings include I Get Ideas, To Each His Own, Begin The Beguine and There’s No Tomorrow.

Although he never became a fully-fledged movie star, Mr Martin starred in 25 films, most of them made during the heyday of the Hollywood musicals.

Offscreen, he married two movie musical superstars, Alice Faye and Cyd Charisse. The latter union lasted 60 years, until Charisse's death in 2008.

A peer of Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, Mr Martin sang in a warm baritone that carried special appeal for his female audience.

“He’s the ultimate crooner who outlasted all his contemporaries,” musician and long-time friend Gabriel Guerrero said from his Oregon home.

Mr Martin found his escape through music while growing up in San Francisco and Oakland in a poor, close-knit Russian Jewish family, enduring taunts from classmates.

Performing on radio led to his break into the film business. His first singing role came in the 1936 Sing Baby Sing, which starred future wife Faye and introduced the Ritz Brothers to the screen as a more frenetic version of the Marx Brothers.

As a contract player at Twentieth Century Fox, Mr Martin also appeared in Pigskin Parade – featuring a young Judy Garland – Banjo On My Knee, with Barbara Stanwyck and Joel McCrea, Sing And Be Happy, You Can’t Have Everything, Ali Baba Goes To Town and Sally, Irene and Mary.

In 1940 he joined MGM and sang in such films as The Ziegfeld Girl (with James Stewart, Lana Turner and Judy Garland), The Big Store (with the Marx Brothers), Till The Clouds Roll By, Easy To Love and Deep in My Heart. In 1948, he produced and starred in Casbah, a well-received film musical version of Algiers with a score by Harold Arlen and Leo Robin.

Mr Martin and and his second wife Cyd Charisee released a 1976 double auto-biography, The Two of Us, and often toured in singing and dancing shows. He continued appearances into his 90s, his voice only slightly tarnished by time.

“His voice is more or less intact,” a New York Times critic wrote when he appeared at a New York club in early 2008.

He is survived by stepson Nico Charisse.