Tony Bennett was optimistic and happy prior to his death at 96, but there is one regret he’ll always have: failing to save troubled British singer Amy Winehouse from her fatal overdose in July 2011.

“Tony lives with the fact that he could have saved Amy by staying by her side, but it just didn’t work out,” an insider previously revealed.

According to the source, the legendary singer, who died on Friday, July 21, couldn’t have a lifesaving talk with Winehouse, as he was committed to going on tour.

Bennett apparently wanted to help her, as he previously struggled with drug addiction in the late 1970s. “What I wanted to do, I wanted to stop her. I wanted to tell her that many years ago I was naughty also with some drugs,” he previously said.

Source: mega

Bennett and Winehouse, who died at 27 years old from alcohol poisoning, first met working at British studio Abbey Road in 2011. They quickly bonded, and when he learned of her battle with cocaine, heroin and alcohol, he was curious if he could save her from going down a similar road he once took.

“I used to take pills — uppies, downies and sleepies,” he wrote in his autobiography All the Things You Are.

From a failed marriage to mourning his mother, he had hit rock bottom, which led him to abuse drugs for two years. He later overdosed on cocaine and passed out in a bathtub, but fortunately, his ex-wife Sandy Grant took him to the hospital.

As OK! previously reported, Bennett lived every day like it was his last.

The musician’s memory had “taken a turn for the worse,” but “singing made him feel good. It was part of his ongoing therapy,” another source revealed.