Benson

Robert Guillaume is an American stage and television actor, known for his role as Benson Du Bois on the TV-series Soap and the spin-off Benson, voicing the mandrill Rafiki in The Lion King and as Isaac Jaffe on Sports Night. In a career that has spanned more than 50 years he has worked extensively... on stage , television , and film. Robert Guillaume was born as Robert Peter Williams in St. Louis, Missouri. He studied at St. Louis University and Washington University and served in the United States Army before pursuing an acting career. On leaving the university, Robert joined the Karamu Players in Cleveland and performed in musical comedies and opera. He toured the world in 1959 as a cast member of the Broadway musical Free and Easy. He made his Broadway debut in Kwamina in 1961.
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Soap is an American sitcom that originally ran on ABC from 1977 into 1981. The show was created as a night-time parody of daytime soap operas, presented as a weekly half-hour prime time comedy. Similar to a soap opera, the show's story was presented in a serial format and included melodramatic plot elements such as alien abduction, demonic possession, murder, and kidnapping. In 2007 it was listed as one of Time magazine's "100 Best TV Shows of... All-TIME," and in 2010, the Tates and the Campbells ranked at number 17 in TV Guide's list of "TV's Top Families". The show was created, written, and executive produced by Susan Harris, and also executive produced by Paul Junger Witt and Tony Thomas. Each returning season was preceded by a 90-minute retrospective of the previous season. Two of these retrospectives were made available on VHS in 1994. The show aired for four seasons and 85 episodes. The final four episodes of the series aired as one-hour episodes during the original run on ABC. These hour-long episodes were later split in two, yielding 93 half-hour episodes for syndication. All episodes are currently available on region 1 DVD in four separate box sets.
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