by Shannonn Kelly

Best known as The Number Painter on the PBS children’s show Sesame Street , and as the quirky English neighbor "Harry Bentley " on the sitcom The Jeffersons that ran from 1975 to 1985 on CBS .

Benedict was found dead Monday, December 1, 2008 on Martha’s Vineyard. His brother, Charles, said authorities were still investigating the cause of death.

The accented speech that he used even offstage led many to assume that Benedict was British.

Paul Benedict was actually born Sept. 17, 1938, in Silver City, New Mexico a town currently of about 12,000 people and home to Harrison Schmitt , the astronaut and Henry McCarty, otherwise known as  "Billy the Kid ".

Benedict was the youngest of six children. His father Mitchell M. Benedict was a doctor and his mother, Alma Marie Loring was a journalist.  "When I was 5 years old, from the first time I went to the movies, I knew I wanted to be an actor," said Benedict during an interview in 1992.

Growing up in Boston, Benedict attended Suffolk University and began his acting career in the 1960s in the Theatre Company of Boston, performing alongside such future stars as Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino.

On Broadway, he appeared opposite Pacino in Eugene O’Neill’s two-character play "Hughie" in 1996 and played the mayor in a 2000 revival of "The Music Man."

Benedict played the director of the Richard III production in the 1977 movie The Goodbye Girl starring Richard Dreyfuss , in which Richard was to be portrayed in the play as a stereotypical gay man.

He was in a short scene in the 1984 mockumentary film This is Spinal Tap , playing the awkward desk clerk who checks in the band. In the 1990 film The Freshman , he played the condescending NYU film school professor of Matthew Broderick ’s main character. He also made a memorable appearance as the incorrectly assumed title character in the 1996 film Waiting for Guffman , another mockumentary involving many of the same writers and actors.

Benedict also played the role of a slave trader in Dino De Laurentiis ‘ Mandingo opposite James Mason and Perry King in 1975. Perhaps his best known movie role was of the reverend Lundquist in the 1972 Sydney Pollack film Jeremiah Johnson .

As a stage director, he was known for taking a work in progress or a new play and laboring with a playwright to infuse it with "intelligence, sympathy and warmth — and of course, humor," The Times reported in 1992.

His breakthrough show as a Stage director was "Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune " in 1987, closely followed by "The Kathy & Mo Show: Parallel Lives" in 1989, both two-person sleepers that became off-Broadway hits in New York.