Robert Benedetti

Producer/Director - Writer - Teacher - Consultant

 

Robert Benedetti  (born February 27th, 1939) is an American actor, theater director, educator, author, film producer, and actor. In a career spanning six decades he has authored works on acting, written plays and screenplays, taught at and headed theater programs at major academic institutions, run a film production company, produced award-winning films for television, and founded the New Mexico Actors Lab theater.

Benedetti and his wife Joan have four children (two by previous relationships), five grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren. They are approaching their Sixtieth Anniversary in 2026.   

Early life

Robert “Beny” Benedetti was born on February 27, 1939 into an Italian-American family in Chicago, Illinois and raised in a Tuscan neighborhood on Chicago's West Side. When he was ten, his family moved to the suburb of Brookfield, where he joined the Riverside-Brookfield High School drama club and dabbled in stage magic.

Education 

In 1956 Benedetti enrolled at Northwestern University to study stage lighting, but got sidetracked into the acting program where he worked with fellow students Dick Benjamin, Paula Prentiss, and Karen Black. Dissatisfied with the “Method” being taught in the Theater Department, he soon transferred into the Department of Oral Interpretation where he was mentored by Dr. Robert Breen, creator of the “Chamber Theater” technique for adapting narrative prose to the stage. He eventually earned a BSc, MA, and PhD all in Oral Interpretation, and served as Graduate Assistant to lighting innovator Theodore Fuchs. 

Academic Career

While finishing his PhD at Northwestern, Benedetti was hired as Director of Theatre at the University of Chicago and was one of three founders of The Court Theatre, then an outdoor summer classics festival. He hung out at Jimmy’s Woodlawn Tap where, a few years before, students Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Ed Asner, Paul Sills, Barbara Harris, Shelly Berman, and Severn Darden had created what would become The Second City. Benedetti and his UC friend David Steinberg formed a comedy duo that performed in Canadian coffeehouses, and both later joined Second City.

After two years in The Second City (1961-63) Benedetti worked with Paul Sills and Viola Spolin to help create the first Games theater in 1964. In 1965 he joined a new graduate company at Indiana University, where the acting classes he taught prompted his supervisor, Oscar Brockett, to urge him to “write that stuff down.” The result was his first book, The Actor at Work (1970), which remains in print and is now in its eleventh edition with a Foreword by Hugh Jackman. In 1966 he took a dual position as Chairman of Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Fine Arts, and Company Director of the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre. In the summer of 1967, he went to the Colorado Shakespeare Festival and directed Henry VI, Part iii, the first of eight summer productions he directed there over the next fourteen years. 

The Actor at Work, Eleventh Edition

In 1968 Benedetti joined the faculty at Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie-Mellon). There his stage adaptation of Huxley’s Brave New World featured second-year student Ted Danson and led to an enduring friendship. While at Carnegie, he directed the AFTRA Award-winning docudrama Stopped Running for the NET Playhouse at nearby public television station WQED. He also served as an advisor to the U. S. Department of Education to design experimental curricula for the Scottsdale, Arizona school system and served also as a Fulbright panelist.

In 1970 Benedetti moved to the Yale Drama School where Dean Robert Brustein appointed him Chair of the Acting Program and Executive Director of the Directing Program. Only a year later Benedetti took the position of Chair of the Theatre Programme at Canada’s York University. During two years in Canada he also served as guest Master Teacher at The National Theatre School of Canada. Returning to the States in 1973, he took a tenured position at the University of California, Riverside, but in 1974 he answered the call of the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) to become Dean of the School of Theater, a position he would hold until 1981. 

Benedetti continued to direct professionally throughout his academic career. In 1973 he directed an avant-garde version of Everyman at the Tyrone Guthrie Theater and returned to the Guthrie in 1976 to direct and perform in Stravinski’s L’Histoire du Soldat, a co-production with the Minneapolis Symphony as the opening event of the new Minneapolis Symphony Hall.  Throughout the seventies and eighties he directed at the Oregon, Colorado, and Great Lakes Shakespeare Festivals and has directed all but six of Shakespeare’s 37 plays.

In 1981 Benedetti was commissioned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art  to recreate Kazimir Malevich's 1913 Futurist opera, Victory Over the Sun.  He revived this production the following year in Washington, DC under the auspices of the Smithsonian and the Shubert Foundation.  The production then embarked on an international tour, opening the Berlin Festival, then traveling to the Demeervart Museum in Amsterdam, and ending at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of the first Next Wave Festival. Later that year, Benedetti and cinematographer Douglas Cruickshank created a film version of Victory Over the Sun that was selected for showing at LA's Filmex, San Antonio's Hemisfilm, the Melbourne Film Festival, and the San Francisco International  Exhibition. It is now in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and many universities. It has been exhibited at the Tate Modern and museums in Milan, Turin, Vienna, and elsewhere.

Over the years Benedetti has made several working visits to Australia. In 1983 he was a Guest Master Teacher at the Victorian College of the Arts, and returned in 1988 for a five month visit to direct that country's premiere of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross for the Melbourne Theatre Company (for which he was nominated for the Australian version of a Tony). In 1993 he was again a Guest Master Teacher at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne and directed a television version of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the Australian Broadcasting Company. During that visit, Actor's Equity of Australia sent him on a tour of the four major Australian cities to give intensive workshops for professional actors. In November of 2004 he and Royal Shakespeare Company Voice Director Cicely Berry conducted a month-long workshop for professional actors and teachers in Sydney. His most recent visit was in 2015 to direct Lanford Wilson’s Hot L Baltimore at the Queensland Institute of Technology in Brisbane. 

 

The Film/TV Years (1991-2001) 

In 1991, at the invitation of his former student Ted Danson, Benedetti went part-time at CalArts and took over the actor’s production company at Paramount Studios. By 1993 he had produced and co-written his first television movie, Mercy Mission: the Rescue of Flight 771 starring Robert Loggia and Scott Bakula. Produced for NBC, the show was shot at Village Road Show Studios in Surfers Paradise, Australia.  

 

Following his return from Australia, Benedetti produced a 1994 Disney Channel film, On Promised Land, starring Joan Plowright and directed by Joan Tewkesbury; it garnered five CableAce nominations, winning for Best Script and was a finalist for the Humanitas Prize. The following year he wrote and produced a modern version of Oscar Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost starring Patrick Stewart and Neve Campbell, which swept all the categories of The Family Film Awards, winning Best Teleplay, Best Actor, and Best Actress awards. In 1995 he also produced two shows for NBC: Fight for Justice: the Nancy Conn Story starring Marilu Henner about the origins of the victim’s rights movement, and a comedy special, An Affectionate Look at Fatherhood starring Kelsey Grammer and 14 other network stars. 

In 1997 his production for HBO of Miss Evers’ Boys, directed by Joe Sargent and starring Alfre Woodard, Laurence Fishburne, Joe Morton, Ossie Davis, and E. G. Marshall, was nominated for twelve Emmys, winning five including Best Movie or Miniseries and a special President’s Emmy for Contribution to Social Justice. It also won the Humanitas Prize and the Helen Hayes Award from the American Medical Association presented to Benedetti by U. S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop. The film was named the year’s best TV Movie by TV Guide and Time Magazine. A dramatization of the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, the film led to a formal apology from President Clinton and reparations to the victim’s families voted by Congress. 

During the mid-90’s Benedetti had joined a small group of producers to form the Producers Guild of America (PGA) and in 1997 he was named the first PGA Producer of the Year for his work on Miss Evers Boys.


The success of Miss Evers Boys led HBO to hire Benedetti and Sargent in 1999 to make A Lesson Before Dying, based on the novel by Ernest Gaines, starring Cicely Tyson and former CalArts student Don Cheadle. It garnered five Emmy nominations and won three, including Best Picture and Best Script. It was named Best TV Movie by the National Board of Review, won the Humanitas Prize, and a Peabody Award. 

In his U. of Chicago years Benedetti had roomed with a fellow student, Aldrich Ames. In 1991 Ames, who had reluctantly followed his father into a career with the CIA and risen to be Head of Counterintelligence, was exposed as a KGB spy. Benedetti visited Ames in prison and they began to collaborate on the storyline for a film chronicling Ames’ career. The result was the 1998 Showtime film, Aldrich Ames: Traitor Within starring Timothy Hutton and Joan Plowright for which Benedetti was Executive Producer. It was nominated for a WGA Award. 

 

Return to Theater: Las Vegas and Santa Fe

Around the turn of the millennium the TV movie business was in the doldrums; the streaming platforms had not yet emerged, and the networks and cable companies had reduced or stopped production. Benedetti, after fifteen years working almost exclusively in film, decided to return to his first loves, teaching and live theater. In 2006 he became a tenured Full Professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and Artistic Director of the Nevada Conservatory Theater, with which he directed numerous plays during his six years at UNLV.  

In 2007 he directed Marc Blitzstein’s 1936 labor opera, The Cradle Will Rock, as the premiere production at the new Walgreen Drama Center at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. This production had been developed years before at CalArts at the suggestion of John Houseman, the play’s original producer. In May 2007 he was invited to deliver the commencement address for the University of Michigan School of Music, Theater, and Dance. 

In 2009, Benedetti and his wife Joan moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. During a workshop sponsored by the Screen Actors Guild, Benedetti reconnected with a former CalArts Student, Nico Ballas: by 2014 they had founded a new nonprofit theater company, the New Mexico Actors Lab (NMAL). Benedetti served as Artistic Director for the first six years, then became Managing Director as Ballas took over as Artistic Director.  During the first ten years of its life, Benedetti directed nineteen plays with the company. (See the NMAL website, www.nmactorslab.com.)

In 2024, Benedetti and Ballas retired, having chosen and trained their successors. They will continue to serve as active consultants to the new artistic leadership and management, and as occasional directors and actors. As the company moves into its next decade with an expanded Board of Directors, Benedetti was able to fulfill his ten-year plan of accumulating an endowment of $200,000 to carry the Actors Lab forward.  

 

Special Positions

1974-78:  Danforth Fellow

1975:  Director, Intercampus Arts Project, University of California.

1975-80:  Member, Board of Directors, Los Angeles Theatre Alliance

1976-80:  Member, Board of Directors, League of Professional Theatre Training Programs. 

1979-84:  Resident Critic, American College Theatre Regional Festivals in:  

          Spokane, Washington, 1979 

          Whitewater, Wisconsin, 1980 

          Los Angeles, 1983 

          Sacramento, 1984 

          Edinburgh, Texas, 1984 

          Humboldt, California, 1987

1981-85:  Member, Editorial Board, Performing Arts Journal.

1982:  Distinguished Guest University Professor, University of Colorado, Boulder.    

1991-93:  Panelist, Fulbright Fellowships

2002:  Delivered the Collins Lecture Series at Indiana University. 

2007:  Delivered commencement address, University of Michigan School of Music, Theater, and Dance.

 

Awards

1969: AFTRA Award for Direction, Best TV Special of Year

1979: Joseph Jefferson Award for Direction, Chicago

1981:   Dramalogue Award for Direction, Los Angeles

1994: Finalist, Humanitas Prize, On Promised Land (Disney Channel.)

1995: Best Teleplay, Family Film Awards, The Canterville Ghost (ABC.)

1997: Emmy, Best Movie or Miniseries, Miss Evers Boys (HBO.)

Humanitas Prize, Miss Evers Boys.

Helen Hayes Award, AMA.

PGA Producer of the Year

1999: Emmy, Best Movie or Miniseries, A Lesson Before Dying (HBO.)

Humanitas Prize, A Lesson Before Dying.

Best Television Movie, National Board of Review. 

Peabody Award.

2005: Lifetime Career Achievement Award, Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE.)

2006: Inducted into the National Theater Conference in New York. 

2010: Inducted into the College of Fellows of the American Theater at the Kennedy Center.

 

Publications

Books:

The Actor at Work (1970, Prentice-Hall, 11th edition 2023, Foreword by Hugh Jackman, Waveland Press)

Seeming, Being, and Becoming: Acting in our Century (1976, Drama Books Specialist Publishers) 

The Director at Work (1985, Foreword by John Houseman, Prentice-Hall)

The Actor in You (1999, Allyn and Bacon, 7th edition 2023, Foreword by Ted Danson, Waveland Press: translated into Danish in 2009)

ACTION! Acting for Film and Television (2001, 3rd edition, )

From Concept to Screen: An overview of Film and Television Production (2002, Allyn and Bacon: translated into Chinese in 2010) 

The Long Italian Goodbye (2005, Durban House)

Looking for Dreamland: The 1921 Tulsa Massacre (2006, Lulu Press) 

Dynamite and Roses: Lucy Parsons and the Haymarket Bombing (2009, Charles H. Kerr Publishing)

 

Screenplays:

1991: The Nekkid Cowboy, Paramount 

1992: The Stolen Gods, Paramount

1993: Mercy Mission: The Rescue of Flight 771, NBC (with George Rubino)

1994: Animal Dreams, Paramount 

1996: The Canterville Ghost, Signboard Hill

1997: Undoing Salk, Viacom (Also a stage play, produced 2004 at the Pittsburgh Playhouse for the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Salk Polio Trials)

1998: Death on Black Wall Street, Showtime 

Copyright 2005-2014 Robert Benedetti Productions. All rights reserved.
Revised: 07/21/14