Paul Benedict

Paul Benedict
Paul Benedict as Harry Bentley, 1975.
Born	(1938-09-17)September 17, 1938 Silver City, New Mexico, United States
Died	December 1, 2008(2008-12-01) (aged 70) Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, United States
Occupation	Film, television actor
Years active	1965–2008

Paul Benedict (September 17, 1938 – December 1, 2008) was an American actor who made numerous appearances in television and movies beginning in 1965. He was known for his roles as The Number Painter on the popular PBS children's show Sesame Street, and as the English neighbor Harry Bentley on the CBS sitcom The Jeffersons.

Benedict was born in Silver City, New Mexico, the son of Alma Marie (née Loring), a journalist, and Mitchell M. Benedict, a doctor. He grew up in Massachusetts. His oversized jaw and large nose were partially attributed to acromegaly; he was first diagnosed with it by an endocrinologist who saw Benedict in a theatrical production.

Norman Lear cast Benedict as a Zen Buddhist in Cold Turkey which was completed in late fall 1969 but not released until February 1971. Benedict would go on to work with Lear in the coming years on Lear's various television projects.

Benedict was best known for his role as Harry Bentley on the television show The Jeffersons. He played this role from 1975 when the show began until 1981, and then returned in 1983 and remained until the end of the show in 1985. His character was a well-mannered Englishman who lived in the apartment next door to George and Louise Jefferson. He worked at the United Nations as a translator and was a bachelor. He was liked by all of the characters on the show except George Jefferson, who found him annoying, but they eventually became friends as the show progressed. Harry was also known for telling boring, pointless stories about his past, particularly about his childhood and relatives in England.

Benedict also played the recurring character The Number Painter on the long-running children's PBS show Sesame Street.

In the movie The Goodbye Girl (1977) starring Richard Dreyfuss and Marsha Mason, Benedict played the stage director of a production of Richard III in which Richard III was to be portrayed in the play as a stereotypical gay man. He was the patiently-eccentric butler in Dr. Necessiter's Gothic-castle apartment in The Man With Two Brains (1983). When Dr. Hfuhruhurr (Steve Martin) complains loudly that he just learned his wife is a slut, Benedict responds, "Yeah, I've heard this." He was in a short scene in the mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap (1984), playing Tucker Smitty Brown, the awkward desk clerk who checks in the band. Called a "twisted old fruit" by the band's manager Ian, he replies, "I'm just as God made me, sir." In 1988 he played 'Fairchild', Dudley Moore's butler in the movie Arthur 2: On the Rocks, the sequel to the hit 1981 film Arthur. That same year in the film Cocktail he would play a condescending business college professor to Tom Cruise's main character. In the 1990 film The Freshman, he would again play a condescending professor, this time an NYU film school professor of Matthew Broderick's main character. He also made an appearance as the incorrectly assumed title character in the 1996 film Waiting for Guffman, another mockumentary involving many of the same writers and actors as This Is Spinal Tap. He also played Fay's father in the story of "Rumpelstitlkstin" in the Between the Lions episode "Hay Day".