By Frank Worth

Dean Martin admiring Pier Angeli’s spectacular engagement ring circa 1955.

Born Dino Paul Crocetti (1917-1995), Dean Martin was an American singer, film actor, and comedian. He was one of the most famous music artists in the 1950s and 1960s.

His hit singles included songs such as Memories are Made of This, That's Amore, Mambo Italiano, Sway, Volare, and Let Me Go Lover. He recorded more than 100 albums and 600 songs. His signature tune was Everybody Loves Somebody.

He appeared destined to remain on the nightclub circuit until he met a young comic named Jerry Lewis at the Glass Hat Club in New York, where both men were performing. They formed a fast friendship which led to their participation in each other's acts and ultimately forming a music-comedy team.

Although there had been a number of hugely successful film teams before, Hollywood had not seen anything like Martin and Lewis. The fun they had together set them apart from everything else being done at the time. Both were talented entertainers, but the fact that they were such good friends on and off stage took their act to a new level.

Their partnership lasted 10 years but by the mid '60s, Dean Martin was a top movie, recording, and nightclub attraction. He was acclaimed for his performance as Dude in Rio Bravo (1959), directed by Howard Hawks and also starring John Wayne and singer Ricky Nelson. He teamed up again with Wayne in The Sons of Katie Elder (1965), where they were somewhat unconvincingly cast as brothers.

Dean Martin played a nightmare variation of his own smoothly womanizing persona as Vegas singer ‘Dino’ in Billy Wilder's adult comedy Kiss Me, Stupid (1964) with Kim Novak, and he was never above poking sly fun at his image in films such as the Matt Helm spy spoofs of the 1960s. The Cannoball Run movies were his last.

For three decades, he was among the most popular nightclub acts in Las Vegas. Dean Martin himself was one of the smoothest comics around, benefiting from the decade of raucous comedy with Jerry Lewis.

After an enormously successful film and music career throughout the fifties and mid-sixties, Dean embarked upon a relatively new medium - television. The Dean Martin Show began on September 16, 1965, in which one of the segments, a celebrity roast, became wildly popular. The Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts became a fast favorite with television audiences and soon evolved to become its own network series. At the time Dean Martin had one of the largest contracts between a network and a star.

In the 11 years of the show, Dean Martin and his panel of pals successfully ridiculed, embarrassed and made fun of legendary stars like, Frank Sinatra, Lucille Ball, Sammy Davis Jr. and even Dean Martin himself.

He was a member of the 1960s Rat Pack with his friends Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr.

Dean Martin received a gold record in 2004 for his fastest-selling album ever, which also hit the iTunes Top 5, and Playboy magazine recently called Martin ‘the coolest man who ever lived’.

Born Anna Maria Pierangeli, Pier Angeli (1932-1971) was an Italian-born actress who came to Hollywood in 1951 but returned to Europe in the 1960’s.

Throughout the 1950’s she made a number of films including The Light Touch, The Story of Three Loves, Sombrero, Flame and the Flesh, The Silver Chalice, Mam'zelle Nitouche, Port Afrique and Somebody Up There Likes Me.