Don Ho

Alternately tagged as a novelty act and as Honolulu's answer to Dean Martin, the baritone lounge vocalist Don Ho was best known for his signature tune, "Tiny Bubbles," and for his trademark raspberry-colored sunglasses. The Kakaako-born chanteur signed with Sinatra's label, Reprise, in the early '60s, which issued his first album, The Don Ho Show, in 1965. Ho landed a massive hit with "Tiny Bubbles" in the fall of 1966, and issued a handful of albums in the ensuing years, but after 1969, Ho's record sales plummeted. To keep himself afloat as an entertainer, he not only became a club staple in his native Hawaii, but branched out into occasional film and television roles. These included guest appearances on such series programs as The Fall Guy, Charlie's Angels, Sanford and Son, The Brady Bunch, and I Dream of Jeannie (where the entertainer seemed particularly at home in the beach-laden setting of Cape Canaveral). Circa 1996, Ho signed for one of his only feature film roles: that of Alberto Bianco, a vile landlord who oversees several dilapidated tenements, in the MTV-produced, FX-laden picture Joe's Apartment. (The film's detractors decried the producers' decision to pass up an onscreen number by Ho and bequeath the singing roles to 5,000 cockroaches instead.) Several years after participating in the documentary Waikiki, in the Wake of Dreams, Ho died of heart failure in Honolulu. He was 76.

~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide