Mario Lanza (January 31, 1921 - October 7, 1959) was an American tenor and Hollywood movie star of the late 1940s and the 1950s. The son of Italian immigrants, he began studying to be a professional singer at the age of April 1959, Lanza suffered a minor heart attack, followed by double pneumonia in August. He died in Rome in October of that year at the age of 38 from a pulmonary embolism after undergoing a controversial weight loss program colloquially known as “the twilight sleep treatment,“ which required its patients to be kept immobile and sedated for prolonged periods.