Paul Benedict, 70, the actor who played the English neighbor Harry Bentley on the sitcom “The Jeffersons,” was found dead Monday on Martha’s Vineyard, Mass. His brother, Charles, said authorities were investigating the cause of death.
Benedict began his acting career in the 1960s in the Theatre Company of Boston, alongside such future stars as Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino. Benedict went on to appear in a number of movies, including a role as the oddball director in “The Goodbye Girl” with Richard Dreyfuss. But he was mainly known for his role as Bentley in “The Jeffersons,” which ran on CBS from 1975 to 1985.
Doris J. Dungey, 47, an influential blogger who under the pseudonym Tanta wrote about the failing U.S. mortgage industry, died of ovarian cancer Sunday in Columbus, Ohio.
Dungey wrote for Calculated Risk, a finance and economics blog that became a favorite of skeptics of the overheated housing loan business largely because of her knowledge and wit.
Among her fans was Paul Krugman, a Nobel laureate, New York Times columnist and Princeton University economist, who quoted her “muddled metaphor index” in his blog. Analysts at the Federal Reserve also footnoted one of her posts in the Fed paper “Understanding the Securitization of Subprime Mortgage Credit.”
Dungey wrote a series of lengthy articles about mortgage origination, negative amortization and automated underwriting systems, which she collected into “The Compleat UberNerd,” a site-within-a-site at the blog.
The Wall Street Journal called her work “one of the smartest and most influential blogs on the mortgage meltdown and resulting financial crisis.”
Before she retired because of her illness, she worked for Mortgage Dynamics of Falls Church, Va., and for E*Trade Capital Markets.
