LOS ANGELES (AP) – 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.

Goulet had connections to Lewiston, Maine. His mother, Jeannette Gauthier, a French Canadian, was born and raised in the city. She married another French Canadian, Joseph Goulet. Their only son was born in Lawrence, Mass., in 1933.

On his deathbed, Joseph told his 13-year-old son: “God gave you a voice, you must sing.”

And sing he did when he returned to Lewiston to belt out the national anthem before the Muhammad Ali-Sonny Lisbon heavyweight championship fight on May 25, 1965.

“The guy was three sheets to the wind,” said spectator David Bernier, who was a 15-year-old high school freshman at the time. “He finally managed to slur his way through it.”

“He was in the bag,” Chuck Frechette said succinctly.

Most newspaper stories at the time said he sang “dawn’s early night” and “gave proof through the fight.” His effort was described as off-key and out of synch with organ accompaniment.

In an interview with online boxing writer Barry Lindenman years ago, Goulet took credit only for his mistake on the opening line.

“Even though I had never sung the national anthem, I said ‘OK’ because I wanted to see the fight,” Goulet said. “So I went and had dinner with the Governor (John Reed) that night. I left the table three times to go to the porch and practice.

“The fight lasted a minute and a half, and they blamed me,” Goulet lamented. “I walked into Lewiston, Maine, a hero because I had a French-Canadian background and I spoke their language. The fight lasted a minute and a half. They blamed me, and I walked out of town a bum.”

Goulet received his 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.

He 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.

He 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.”

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 (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.”

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