Paul L. Smith (1936-2012) was a Jewish-American actor and filmmaker who first came to Israel in in the late 1950s to film Exodus, a 1959 drama where he played an illegal Jewish immigrant, making his way to pre-Israel Palestine. Several years later, Smith returned to Israel where he married a local and settled in Tel Aviv. In 1968, he directed the documentary, War of 20 Years in which he overviews all of Israel’s wars and terrorist attacks it had thus far faced between the War of Independence and 1967’s Six-Day War. In the early ‘70s, he starred in George Obadiah’s films Fishke Goes to War (1971), Nahtche V’Hageneral (‘Nahtche and the general’) (1972), and The Bull Buster (1973) and in between, directed the film Tel Aviv Call Girls (1972). In 1974, Smith moved to Italy where he began appearing in a string of Spaghetti Westerns before later on, heading back to his native US. In 1978, Smith appeared in Alan Parker’s Midnight Express (1978) where he played the sadistic prison warden. Then, two years later he took on the role of villain Bluto in Robert Altman’s Popeye adaptation (1980). He later also appeared in David Lynch’s Dune (1984) and in the adventure fantasy, Red Sonja (1985). In the early 2000s, Smith moved back to Israel and changed his name to Adam Eden.
