Paul Benjamin

Paul Benjamin (February 4, 1935 – June 28, 2019) was an American actor whose career spanned stage, film, and television across several decades. Born in Pelion, South Carolina, the youngest of twelve children, he was the son of Fair Benjamin, a Baptist preacher, and Rosa Benjamin (née Butler). Following the deaths of both parents, Benjamin relocated to Columbia, South Carolina, where he was raised by an older brother. He attended C.A. Johnson High School and later enrolled at Benedict College before moving to New York City to study acting at the Herbert Berghof Studio.

Benjamin made his film debut in 1969, appearing as a bartender in Midnight Cowboy. The following year he appeared on Broadway in two productions: Camino Real and Operation Sidewinder. He subsequently took small roles in Sidney Lumet's The Anderson Tapes (1971) and Born to Win (1971) before landing a major part in Barry Shear's Across 110th Street (1972), in which he played Jimmy Harris, a criminal whose robbery of an Italian Mafia operation sets off a violent pursuit involving both the Mafia and Harlem's criminal organizations. He continued working with Shear on the western The Deadly Trackers (1973) and appeared in Michael Campus's The Education of Sonny Carson (1974), Arthur Marks's Friday Foster (1975), Gordon Parks's biopic Leadbelly (1976), and Don Siegel's prison film Escape from Alcatraz (1979).

Throughout the 1970s Benjamin also worked extensively in television, including the 1979 TV adaptation of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. His film work in the 1980s included Gideon's Trumpet (1980), Some Kind of Hero (1982) opposite Richard Pryor, Martin Ritt's Nuts (1987) starring Barbra Streisand, and Pink Cadillac (1989) with Clint Eastwood. That same year he appeared in Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing. In 1987 he starred in the HBO film The Man Who Broke 1,000 Chains, based on the novel by Robert E. Burns.

Into the 1990s, Benjamin appeared in Robert Townsend's The Five Heartbeats (1991), Bill Duke's Hoodlum (1997), in which he portrayed an elder figure within Harlem's criminal world during the Prohibition era, and John Singleton's Rosewood (1997). On television, he appeared in a 1989 episode of In the Heat of the Night as a death row inmate and in the 1994 pilot episode of ER, a role that developed into a recurring part as homeless man Al Ervin over several subsequent seasons. He also appeared in an episode of the fourteenth season of Law & Order titled "Identity" (2003) and in an episode of The Shield. Benjamin contributed to an American Masters documentary on Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ralph Ellison, which aired on PBS.

After 2000, Benjamin worked primarily in independent films, including Stanley's Gig, The Station Agent, Deacons for Defense, and James Hunter's Back in the Day (2005). He died on June 28, 2019, in Los Angeles at the age of 84.