Singer Robert Goulet, best-known for ‘Camelot’

LOS ANGELES - Robert Goulet, 73, the handsome, big-voiced baritone whose Broadway debut in

Camelot

launched an award-winning stage and recording career, died Tuesday at a Los Angeles hospital while awaiting a lung transplant, his spokesman said.

Norm Johnson said Mr. Goulet had been awaiting a transplant at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center after being found last month to have a rare form of pulmonary fibrosis.

Mr. Goulet had remained in good spirits even as he awaited 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.

The Massachusetts-born Mr. Goulet, who spent much of his youth in Canada, gained stardom in 1960 with Camelot, the Lerner and Loewe musical that starred Richard Burton as King Arthur and Julie Andrews as his Queen Guinevere.

Mr. Goulet played Sir Lancelot, the arrogant French knight who falls in love with Guinevere.

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 a TV show called General Electric's Showtime.

The Los Angeles Times wrote in 1963 that Mr. Goulet "is popping up in specials so often these days that you almost feel he has a weekly show. The handsome lad is about the hottest item in show business since his Broadway debut."

Mr. Goulet won a Grammy Award in 1962 as best new artist and made the singles chart in 1964 with "My Love Forgive Me."

While he returned to Broadway only infrequently after Camelot, he did win a Tony 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. A 1998 Camelot revival brought him to Philadelphia's Merriam Theater.

His stage credits elsewhere included South Pacific at the Merriam Theater in 2002. He also starred in productions of Carousel, Finian's Rainbow, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, The Pajama Game, and Meet Me in St. Louis.

He also got some film work, performing in movies ranging from the animated Gay Purr-ee (1962) to Underground (1970) to Naked Gun 21/2 (1991). He played a lounge singer in Louis Malle's acclaimed 1980 film, Atlantic City.

Mr. Goulet had no problems poking fun at his fame, appearing recently in an Emerald nuts commercial in which he "messes" with the stuff of dozing office workers, and lending his name to Goulet's SnoozeBars.

"You have to have humor and be able to laugh at yourself," Mr. Goulet said in a biography on his Web site.

Mr. Goulet received vocal training at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto but decided opera wasn't for him. He made his first professional appearance at 16 with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra. His early success on Canadian television preceded his breakthrough on Broadway.

In his last performance, Sept. 20 in Syracuse, N.Y., the crooner was backed by a 15-piece orchestra as he performed the one-man show A Man and His Music.

Mr. Goulet's 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.