Richard Benjamin (born May 22, 1938) is an American actor and film director. He has starred in a number of well-known film productions, including Goodbye, Columbus (1969), based on the novella by Philip Roth; Catch-22 (1970), from the Joseph Heller best-seller; Westworld (1973), a science-fiction thriller by Michael Crichton; and The Sunshine Boys (1975), written by Neil Simon. After directing for television, Benjamin’s first feature as director was the 1982 comedy My Favorite Year, for which star Peter O’Toole was Oscar-nominated. His other films as director include City Heat (1984), starring Burt Reynolds and Clint Eastwood, Made in America, and The Money Pit (1986) with Tom Hanks. (More from Wikipedia)
When I first encountered Hamilton Camp, he was in a supporting role on one of my favorite sitcoms of all time, He & She. The show starred Richard Benjamin (as a cartoonist) and Paula Prentiss (as a social worker) as a married couple; they have one of the longest lived marriages in Hollywood (52 years and counting). One of the Benjamin character’s cartoons had become the basis of a television show; the perfectly cast Jack Cassidy co-starred as the egomaniacal actor who played “Jetman” on that show. Hamilton Camp played the folksy handyman for the apartment building where the couple lived, and the cast also featured Kenneth Mars as a firefighter who often walked into their apartment via a plank that he extended from the firehouse into a window in their apartment.
(June 2013/2)
