Richard Benjamin's Main TV Roles Show Character(s) Quark Adam Quark The Jonathan Winters Show Richard Ben… He & She Dick Hollis…

Main Movie Roles 2008 - Henry Poole Is Here 2006 - Keeping Up with the Steins 2003 - Marci X 1997 - Deconstructing Harry 1981 - Saturday The 14th 1979 - Scavenger Hunt 1979 - Love at First Bite 1978 - House Calls 1973 - The Last of Sheila 1973 - Westworld 1970 - Diary of a Mad Housewife 1970 - Catch-22 1969 - Goodbye, Columbus

BIOGRAPHY:

Richard Benjamin (born May 22, 1938) is an American actor and film director. He has starred in a number of productions, including Goodbye, Columbus (1969), based on the novella by Philip Roth, and Westworld (1973), and directed, among other films, the 1982 film My Favorite Year.[1]

Life and career Benjamin was born in New York City, New York, the son of a garment industry worker.[2] He attended the High School of Performing Arts and graduated from Northwestern University, where he was involved in many plays and studied in the Northwestern theater school.
He married actress Paula Prentiss on October 26, 1961; and they have two children. They appeared together in the short-lived television series He & She (1967–68) and the film Catch-22 (1970). In 1978, he starred in the ambitious, but short-lived, television series Quark.
Benjamin starred in Goodbye, Columbus (1969), based on the novella by Philip Roth. After appearing with a star-studded cast in the Mike Nichols film (1970) version of another best-seller, Catch-22, he starred in Diary of a Mad Housewife, The Marriage of a Young Stockbroker, and yet another film based on a famous Roth novel, Portnoy's Complaint (1972), in the title role.
He played a sexually ambiguous murder suspect in The Last of Sheila (1973), a mystery conceived and co-scripted by Anthony Perkins and Stephen Sondheim. In an imaginative Michael Crichton story, Westworld (1973), Benjamin played a man vacationing as a make-believe cowboy in a theme park where he ends up being stalked by a robot gunslinger played by Yul Brynner.
Then he returned to comedy, with a supporting role as a harried theatrical agent in the Neil Simon hit The Sunshine Boys opposite Walter Matthau and George Burns and as Matthau's colleague at an ineptly run hospital in House Calls (1978). Benjamin also played a frustrated fiance of a woman who falls for the vampire Count Dracula in the surprise box-office smash Love at First Bite (1979) starring George Hamilton and Susan Saint James.


TRIVIA:

• Father of son 'Ross Benjamin' (qv) (born in 1974) and daughter, 'Prentiss Benjamin' (qv) (born in 1978), with wife 'Paula Prentiss' (qv).
• In the mid-1950s, another actor, 'Richard Lightner' (qv), also worked under the name of Richard Benjamin and his credits are often erroneously included with those of the better known Richard Benjamin, who first acted professionally in the mid-1960s.
• Brother-in-law of 'Ann Prentiss' (qv).
• Tested for the role of Ted Henderson in "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice" (1969).