PAUL SHENAR, American actor, born (d: 1989); An American actor born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Shenar gained attention playing larger-than-life entertainment legends on 1970s television. He portrayed Orson Welles in the TV movie The Night that Panicked America (1975) (TV) and Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. in Ziegfeld: The Man and His Women (1978) (TV).

He is probably best known for playing the murderous drug lord Alejandro Sosa in Brian DePalma’s 1983 feature film version of Scarface, opposite Al Pacino.

A founding member, actor, director and teacher of the American Conservatory Theatre (ACT) in San Francisco, he played more than forty roles there, including Hamlet, Oedipus Rex, and Tiny Alice. Known for his unsympathetic portrayals, he voiced the evil rat Jenner in the animated feature The Secret of NIMH (1982).

He also had a very successful career as a commercial voice actor, and was the sexy basso-baritone voice of Mercedes Benz, and Oil of Olay. He was in a long-term relationship with actor Jeremy Brett (“Sherlock Holmes”) in the 70s.

He was also a lover of this humble reporter in the early 80s, and I can personally report that he had a voice that was just about as sexy as you can imagine. He called me, from the road, once when I was living in New Haven, CT. My housemate answered the phone and handed it to me, saying “I feel like I’ve just been f**ked!” Paul Shenar died of HIV-AIDS-related complications in West Hollywood, California.