Paula Prentiss

Paula Prentiss, born Paula Ragusa on March 4, 1938, in San Antonio, Texas, is an American actress whose career has spanned film, television, and stage. She is the elder daughter of Paulene and Thomas J. Ragusa, a social sciences professor at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio. Her father was of Sicilian descent, and she was raised Roman Catholic. Her younger sister, Ann Prentiss, was also an actress. Prentiss attended Lamar High School in Houston and subsequently enrolled as a pre-med student at Randolph-Macon Women's College before transferring to Northwestern University after taking a summer theater arts course there. At Northwestern, she committed to studying drama and graduated in 1959. It was during her time at Northwestern, in 1958, that she met actor Richard Benjamin, whom she married in 1961. The couple has two children. While still a student, she was discovered by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and offered a film contract.

Prentiss rose to prominence playing Tuggle in the MGM comedy Where the Boys Are (1960), opposite Jim Hutton. The film's success led MGM to pair the two actors in three additional comedies: The Honeymoon Machine (1961) with Steve McQueen, Bachelor in Paradise (1961) with Bob Hope, and The Horizontal Lieutenant (1962). Hutton and Prentiss were the two tallest contract players of either gender at the studio. A fourth pairing was planned for Follow the Boys (1963), but after Hutton withdrew, Russ Tamblyn became her co-star instead. Her first film outside MGM came when Howard Hawks cast her opposite Rock Hudson in Man's Favorite Sport? (1964) at Universal. That same year she appeared in The World of Henry Orient and made a cameo as herself in Looking for Love. In 1965 she had a supporting role in What's New Pussycat? alongside Peter Sellers, as well as a role in In Harm's Way.

Beyond film, Prentiss appeared on stage in a 1963 New York Shakespeare Festival production of As You Like It in Central Park, and in 1969 she performed Off-Broadway in the double bill Arf and The Great Airplane Snatch, directed by Benjamin. For the 1967–1968 television season, she and Benjamin co-starred in the CBS sitcom He & She, a role that earned her a nomination for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series.

Her film work continued into the 1970s with a range of notable credits. She played Nurse Duckett in the adaptation of Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1970), appeared alongside Elliott Gould in Move (1970) and George Segal in Born to Win (1971), and was among the leads in Last of the Red Hot Lovers. She had the female lead in Crazy Joe (1974), a small but pivotal part in The Parallax View (1974) with Warren Beatty, and was second lead in The Stepford Wives (1975) alongside Katharine Ross.

In 1975, Prentiss appeared on Broadway in all three parts of Alan Ayckbourn's The Norman Conquests trilogy: Living Together, Round and Round the Garden, and Table Manners. Following that engagement, she and Benjamin traveled to Australia to film No Room to Run (1977). Her subsequent television work included Having Babies II (1977), Friendships, Secrets and Lies (1979), and Top of the Hill (1980), as well as guest appearances on Murder, She Wrote and Burke's Law. On the theatrical side, she also had a starring role in The Black Marble (1980). She appeared alongside her husband in Saturday the 14th (1981) and was part of the cast of director Billy Wilder's final film, Buddy Buddy (1981), with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. Additional credits from the early 1980s include Packin' It In (1983) and the television film M.A.D.D.: Mothers Against Drunk Drivers (1983).

After more than three decades away from feature films, Prentiss returned in I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016), a horror film directed by Oz Perkins that had its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 10, 2016. A street in her hometown of San Antonio, Texas, bears her name.