Paul Smith (American comedy actor)

Paul Smith is an American comic character actor with a perpetually perplexed or, alternatively, bemused expression, who, during the 1950s, 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, appeared in scores of television episodes, primarily sitcoms, including regular roles in five series, and was also seen in numerous theatrical features, television films and commercials, frequently in brief, sometimes unbilled, comedic bits.

The American actor whose career under the name Paul Smith lasted from the 1960 to the 1990s, was born in 1936 and died in 2012. Distinctive for his imposing size and hulking, occasionally bearded persona, he began acting in 1960, but the great majority of his credits are from the 1970s and 1980s, with a few stretching into the 1990s . Although on at least one occasion he was billed as P. L. Smith and on at least three occasions as Paul Lawrence Smith, his most frequent billing has been alternatively Paul L. Smith or, simply, Paul Smith . Some of the film and television credits from the late 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, in which he was billed as Paul Smith, overlap those of the subject of this article, for whom the website AllMovie has no listing and assigns all of his film credits to Paul L. Smith. Other filmographies, including those in American Film Institute Catalog and Turner Classic Movies also feature Paul Smith filmographies with incorrect attribution.

Source: Wikipedia