Tony Bennett was born Anthony Dominick Benedetto on August 3, 1926, in Queens, New York City, and grew up in Astoria, the third child of John Benedetto, a grocer who had emigrated from Calabria in southern Italy, and Anna Suraci Benedetto, a seamstress born in the United States to Calabrian parents. His father died when he was ten. By then he was already singing in public, and he performed at the opening of the Triborough Bridge. He studied painting and music at the School of Industrial Art, left at sixteen to help support the family, and sang for tips as a singing waiter in Italian restaurants around Queens.

He was drafted in November 1944 and served as an infantry rifleman with the 63rd Infantry Division in France and Germany in the last months of the war, an experience that made him a lifelong pacifist. After the fighting he sang with an Army Special Services band under the stage name Joe Bari. Back in New York in 1946 he studied bel canto technique at the American Theatre Wing on the GI Bill, and a teacher there suggested the habit that shaped his style: phrasing a song the way a horn or piano player would. He modeled his lines on Stan Getz's tenor saxophone and on the piano of Art Tatum. Two songs he cut as Joe Bari in 1949 for the small Leslie label, including "Fascinatin' Rhythm," went nowhere.

That same year Pearl Bailey asked him to open for her in Greenwich Village. Bob Hope saw the show, took him on the road and shortened his name to Tony Bennett. In 1950 Mitch Miller signed him to Columbia Records after hearing a demo of "Boulevard of Broken Dreams," and the early hits were straight pop. "Because of You," with an orchestral arrangement by Percy Faith, reached No. 1 in 1951 and held the top spot for ten weeks; "Cold, Cold Heart" followed it to No. 1 the same year, and "Rags to Riches," a brassy up-tempo number, spent eight weeks at No. 1 in 1953. "Stranger in Paradise," recorded to promote the Broadway musical Kismet, also reached the top. For most of the 1950s he was a hit-parade singer, and the jazz side of his work was something he had to fight to expand.

The turn began with the guitarist Chuck Wayne, who became his musical director in 1954 and co-arranged Cloud 7 (1955), a Columbia album with a small jazz combo. In 1957 the English-born pianist Ralph Sharon took over as pianist, arranger and musical director and pushed him further toward jazz. The result was The Beat of My Heart (Columbia, 1957), an album built around drummers and percussionists: Art Blakey, Chico Hamilton, Jo Jones, Candido and Sabu Martinez, with Herbie Mann among the flutists and Nat Adderley on trumpet, Al Cohn on tenor saxophone, Kai Winding on trombone and Eddie Costa on vibraphone. He followed it with two albums with the Count Basie Orchestra in 1959. In Person! was meant to be a live record of a November 1958 engagement at Philadelphia's Latin Casino, but the producer, Al Ham, wanted stereo, so the band re-created the set in a New York studio on December 22 and 30, 1958 and dubbed in applause that Bennett later disliked. Strike Up the Band, recorded January 3 and 5, 1959 for Basie's own label, Roulette, was the one he said he preferred.

On June 9, 1962 he gave a concert at Carnegie Hall with Sharon's trio and a larger band that included Al Cohn, Kenny Burrell and Candido, recorded for release that summer. The same month Columbia issued the album I Left My Heart in San Francisco, built around a song that its composers, George Cory and Douglass Cross, had given to Sharon. The single reached No. 19 on the Billboard Hot 100 but stayed on charts for close to a year; it won Record of the Year and Best Solo Vocal Performance, Male at the 1963 Grammy Awards and became his signature.

The British Invasion and the rock era cut into the market for standards singers. Sharon left in 1965, Columbia pressed Bennett toward contemporary material, and the results, such as Tony Sings the Great Hits of Today! (1970), pleased no one, least of all him. He left Columbia in 1972 for MGM's Verve division and spent time in London, then started his own label, Improv. On it, and on Fantasy, he made two duo albums with the pianist Bill Evans. The Tony Bennett/Bill Evans Album was recorded June 10 to 13, 1975 at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley, produced by Evans's manager Helen Keane, after the singer Annie Ross had suggested the pairing. Together Again was recorded in September 1976 and issued in 1977, shortly before Improv went out of business. By the end of the decade he had no recording contract and no manager, and after a near-fatal overdose in 1979 he asked his sons Danny and Dae for help. Danny took over as his manager, brought his father's finances back under control and moved him back to New York.

The revival kept the music exactly as it was. Sharon returned as pianist and music director, and by 1986 Bennett was back on Columbia with creative control. The Art of Excellence (1986) was his first charting album in years, and Bennett/Berlin (1987), an Irving Berlin tribute, brought in Dizzy Gillespie, Dexter Gordon and George Benson as guests. Astoria: Portrait of the Artist (1990) was nominated for the Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Performance, Male. Danny Bennett booked his father onto Late Night with David Letterman and MTV, and the tribute albums Perfectly Frank (1992), for Frank Sinatra, and Steppin' Out (1993), for Fred Astaire, each won a Grammy for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Performance. MTV Unplugged: Tony Bennett, recorded in 1994 with the Ralph Sharon Trio and guests Elvis Costello and k.d. lang, went platinum and won the Grammy for Album of the Year at the 1995 ceremony. Themed albums followed: Here's to the Ladies (1995), Tony Bennett on Holiday (1997), a tribute to Billie Holiday, and Bennett Sings Ellington: Hot & Cool (1999), a Duke Ellington centennial album with Wynton Marsalis and the trombonist Al Grey among the players.

Honors came in a long run. He was inducted into the Big Band and Jazz Hall of Fame in 1997, received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001, was a Kennedy Center honoree in December 2005, and in 2006 was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master. He joined the DownBeat Jazz Hall of Fame in 2015 and received the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize in 2017. In the same years he turned the duets idea into a commercial franchise. Duets: An American Classic (2006) paired him with singers from every part of popular music, including Stevie Wonder, and won the Grammy for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album. Duets II (2011) reached No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and included "Body and Soul," a duet with Amy Winehouse that was reportedly her last recording. Cheek to Cheek (2014), with Lady Gaga, was recorded with a live band of jazz musicians, entered the chart at No. 1 when he was 88 and won a Grammy. The Silver Lining: The Songs of Jerome Kern (2015), with the pianist Bill Charlap's trio, won a Grammy; the trio's bassist on it was Peter Washington. Love Is Here to Stay (2018), with Diana Krall and the Charlap trio, included a new recording of "Fascinating Rhythm," the song he had first recorded as Joe Bari 68 years earlier.

His last album, Love for Sale, a Cole Porter tribute with Lady Gaga recorded between 2018 and early 2020, came out on September 30, 2021, when he was 95. It won the Grammy for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album and was nominated for Album of the Year at the 2022 ceremony. In February 2021 it became public that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 2016. He gave his final concerts with Lady Gaga at Radio City Music Hall on August 3 and 5, 2021, and his retirement from live performance was announced on August 12. His last televised appearance, again with Gaga, was an MTV Unplugged special broadcast in December 2021. Tony Bennett passed away at his home in New York City on July 21, 2023, at the age of 96. His family said he sang until the end, and that his last song was "Because of You."

Outside music he was a serious painter, working under his birth name, Anthony Benedetto, and exhibiting around the world. In 2001, with Susan Crow, he founded the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts, a public performing-arts high school in Astoria, and the arts education nonprofit Exploring the Arts.

Bennett's category is a matter of record: he spent his career as a traditional pop singer, most of his Grammys were awarded in the Traditional Pop Vocal categories, and his biggest hits were pop singles recorded for a major label. What ties him to jazz is how he sang and who he sang with. His bel canto training gave him projection and breath control (in concert he often sang a song without a microphone), and the instruction to phrase like an instrumentalist gave him a way of bending time against a rhythm section that he took from the saxophone and piano players he admired. He listened to Louis Armstrong, Jack Teagarden and Joe Venuti as a boy, and in his NEA Jazz Masters statement he named Art Tatum's habit of making each performance dramatic and unexpected as the model he tried to follow. He insisted on jazz musicians as accompanists, from Chuck Wayne and Ralph Sharon to the Basie band, Bill Evans and the Bill Charlap Trio, and he recorded one of the stronger arguments for the singer-pianist duo with Evans. Critics were not unanimous: a 1959 review of In Person! called his intonation and phrasing a weakness next to the Basie band, while Billboard praised the same record as an exciting set. Frank Sinatra called him the best singer in the business, according to the NEA's biography. His influence runs through the vocalists who took up the Great American Songbook after him, among them Lady Gaga, who recorded two albums with him, and the singer Allan Harris, who credits him as a mentor.