It was just a few days ago that Robert Goulet, awaiting a lung transplant, uttered words of triumph and hope: “Hey, let,’s go, give me a new pair of lungs and I, I’ll hit the high notes till I’m 100.” He has died:

Robert Goulet, who marshaled his dark good looks and thundering baritone voice to play a dashing Lancelot in the original “Camelot” in 1960, then went on to a wide-ranging career as a singer and actor, winning a Tony, a Grammy and an Emmy, died today. He was 73.

The singer died in a Los Angeles hospital while awaiting a lung transplant, a Goulet spokesman said in an e-mail, according to the Associated Press.

In September, Mr. Goulet received a diagnosis of interstitial pulmonary fibrosis, a rapidly progressive, potentially fatal condition, his wife, Vera, said in a statement released on Oct. 25 on Mr. Goulet’s website. On Oct. 13, he was transferred from a hospital in Las Vegas, where he lived, to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles to await the transplant.

After the “Camelot” triumph, Mr. Goulet was called the next great matinee idol. Judy Garland described him as a living 8-by-10 glossy. He was swamped with offers to do movies, television shows and nightclub engagements. Few articles failed to mention his bedroom blue eyes, and many female fans tossed him room keys during performances. His hit song from the show, “If Ever I Would Leave You,” remains a romantic standard.

“Something in his voice evokes old times and romance,” Alex Witchel wrote in the New York Times Magazine in 1993. “He makes you remember corsages.”

Still, Mr. Goulet left a sense that he might have even been more than he was. For a suave musical theater performer, he arrived late, just after Elvis and just before the Beatles. In 1961, The New York Daily News Magazine called him “just the man to help stamp out rock ’n’ roll.” But it was an impossible assignment.

Moreover, the public had begun to lose its appetite for over-the-top entertainment deities. “We’re no longer something that’s on the dark side of the moon — unattainable,” Mr. Goulet told The Saturday Evening Post in 1963.

We pay tribute with a video: Robert Goulet and Barbara Cook’s “Salute to the 1962 Broadway Season. (A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Camelot, No Strings & Milk and Honey)