Paul Benjamin, who died this week at the age of 70, was a character actor in the all but lost tradition of classic Hollywood comedies, the missing link between the likes of Mischa Auer and Franklin Pangborn and the counterculture improv theater of the 1950s and '60s. With his lanky frame and elongated jaw--the result of a childhood illness--he seemed to have been built for a career in the Sunday Funnies, and when he spoke, he had a special gift for seeming both professorial and slightly insane. In one of his earliest film roles, in Milos Forman's Taking Off (1971), he counseled a meeting of middle-class parents trying to figure out how to better understand their teenage kids on how to smoke marijuana. He followed that up by playing sidekick to Alan Arkin in the little seen Deadhead Miles (1972), which was written by Terrence Malick; gave Christianity a bad name as a frontier clergyman with the sniffles in Jeremiah Johnson (1972); lectured partygoers on the tribal mating rituals in Up the Sandbox (1972); helped Bruce Dern pass for normal as one of the California rotary club types in Smile (1975); helped David Warner pass for almost sort of normal as his Teutonic butler in The Man with Two Brains (1983); and tried to school Matthew Broderick in the art of film as the immortal Professor Arthur Fleeber in The Freshman (1980). He was also a recurring figure in the Christopher Guest mockumentary industry, with small roles in This Is Spinal Tap, Waiting for Guffman, and A Mighty Wind (2003). For all that, he was probably best known to most people as the giddily unsocialized Mr. Bentley on The Jeffersons, a job that he held down for ten years from 1975 to 1985, and one that left most of the country stubbornly convinced that Benedict, who was born in Silver City, New Mexico, was English. He also had a recurring role as the Number Painter on Sesame Street.
A theater veteran, Benedict also directed the original off-Broadway production of Terrence McNally's Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, starring Kathy Bates and Kenneth Welsh, in 1987, and co-starred with Al Pacino in a 1996 Circle in the Square production of the Eugene O'Neill two-hander Hughie. Last year, Benedict, who made his home at Martha's Vineyard, appeared in the American Repertory Theatre production of Harold Pinter's No Man's Land in Cambridge. His last film appearance was in the 2004 Pierce Brosnan movie After the Sunset.