Life and career

Benzali was born in Rio de Janeiro, the son of Lee, a cook, and Carlo Benzali, a salesman and actor in the Yiddish theater in New York. His family are Brazilian Jews. Benzali is the middle son of three boys. He moved to the United States in 1953, and was raised in Brooklyn, New York.

Benzali was a theatre actor, including the Royal Shakespeare Company in Great Britain, when in 1985 he had a role in the James Bond film A View to a Kill as W.G. Howe, the Californian director of Oil and Mines, based at San Francisco City Hall. His character was shot dead in his office there by Christopher Walken's character Max Zorin.

Following that role, he began making guest-starring roles on television series such as Strong Medicine, Star Trek: The Next Generation, The X-Files, NYPD Blue and L.A. Law. L.A. Law creator Steven Bochco was so impressed with Benzali's performance that he cast him in the lead role of his 1995 series Murder One, playing attorney Ted Hoffman. For this role he was nominated for a Golden Globe award. Benzali starred on the series The Agency, and in films such as By Dawn's Early Light (1990), Murder at 1600 (1997) and The Grey Zone (2001).

He appeared in the post-apocalyptic CBS series Jericho as the enigmatic former Department of Homeland Security director Thomas Valente. Most recently he starred in the FX television series Nip/Tuck as Dr. Griffin. Another role was as Reggie, a drug smuggler working at a car dealership in Suckers (1999)".

Benzali has also played musical theater. He portrayed Juan Peron in the London cast of Evita, and played faded film director Max von Mayerling, alongside Patti LuPone, in the original cast (1993) of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Sunset Boulevard. Benzali had previously appeared on Broadway in Fiddler on the Roof, and other smaller productions. In December 2010, Benzali joined ABC's General Hospital. Benzali played a character named Theodore Hoffman, a reference to his role on the mid-1990s television series Murder One.

[ Source: Wikipedia ]