IN: Convy was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the son of Monica (nee Whalen) and Bernard Fleming Convy. Convy's family moved to Los Angeles when he was seven years old. He later attended North Hollywood High School where he was an all-around athlete. The Philadelphia Phillies offered him a contract when he was just 17 and he played two years of minor league baseball in 1951-52.

He turned to acting full-time in 1956 and was in the musical The Billy Barnes Revue in Los Angeles before moving to New York City. He appeared in 10 Broadway shows, including "Nowhere to Go but Up", Cabaret (originator of the role of Cliff, Sally Bowles' boyfriend), and The Impossible Years. He played the reporter Hildy Johnson in a 1969 Broadway revival of The Front Page, which starred Robert Ryan. In the original Broadway cast of Fiddler on the Roof with Zero Mostel, Convy played Perchik the Student and sang "Now I Have Everything". In the 1960-1961 season, Convy guest starred on Pat O'Brien's short-lived sitcom Harrigan and Son as well as the series 77 Sunset Strip in the role of David. He was also cast on an episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show as Mary's friend Jack Foster, alongside future Alice star Beth Howland. In 1973, Convy was a guest star in two episodes of Hawaii Five-O. Convy also guest starred in an episode of Perry Mason titled "The Case of the Nimble Nephew". He played Harry Thompson, the defendant. In 1974, Convy portrayed Lt. Steve Ostrowski, the police officer nephew of elderly amateur sleuths on the short-lived series The Snoop Sisters. Convy attempted a short-lived variety series called The Late Summer Early Fall Bert Convy Show in 1976. In 1979, he appeared with the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders in their eponymous television movie. Throughout his career, Convy was a frequent guest star on series such as Bewitched, Hawaii Five-O, The Partridge Family, Mission: Impossible, The Silent Force, The New Phil Silvers Show, Fantasy Island, Charlie's Angels and Murder, She Wrote (including the pilot episode). In 1983, Convy was cast as Neil Townsend on the sitcom It's Not Easy, playing opposite Ken Howard. Convy had joined the project when it was recast after its intended premiere in the 1982-83 season was delayed; he earned the role originally given to Larry Breeding, who was killed in a car accident in September 1982 after the first pilot was shot. Convy also starred in several movies, perhaps most memorably Semi-Tough (1977), in which he played a caricature of Werner Erhard named Friedrich Bismark. Other film credits included A Bucket of Blood (1959), Susan Slade (1961), Philippe de Broca's Les Caprices de Marie (1970), SST: Death Flight (1977), the horror film Jennifer (1978), Hanging by a Thread (1979), Racquet (1979), The Man in the Santa Claus Suit (1979), Hero at Large (1980), The Cannonball Run (1981), and the television movie Help Wanted: Male (1982). Convy tried his hand at directing with the comedy Weekend Warriors (1986). In 1980, Convy produced and directed the Goodspeed Opera House premiere of the musical Zapata, with music and lyrics by Harry Nilsson and Perry Botkin, Jr., and libretto by Allan Katz.
QUESTION: When did Convy start acting?
IN: Stein was born in Washington, D.C., the son of Mildred (nee Fishman), a homemaker, and Herbert Stein, a writer, economist, and presidential adviser. He is Jewish and grew up in the Woodside Forest neighborhood of Silver Spring, Maryland. Stein graduated from Montgomery Blair High School in 1962 along with classmate journalist Carl Bernstein (class of 1960); actress Goldie Hawn (class of 1963) was one year behind.

In the period preceding the late-2000s recession, Stein made frequent and vehement claims that the economy was not in recession, and that the issues in the housing market would not affect the broader economy. On March 18, 2007, in a column for CBS News' online version of CBS News Sunday Morning, Stein famously proclaimed in the beginning of the subprime mortgage crisis that the foreclosure problem would "blow over and the people who buy now, in due time, will be glad they did," the economy was "still very strong," and the "smart money" was "now trying to buy--not sell--as much distressed merchandise" in mortgages as possible. In an August 12, 2007 column in The New York Times, titled "Chicken Little's Brethren, on the Trading Floor", Stein, while acknowledging "I don't know where the bottom is on subprime. I don't know how bad the problems are at Bear (Bear Stearns)" claimed that "subprime losses are wildly out of all proportion to the likely damage to the economy from the subprime problems," and "(t)his economy is extremely strong. Profits are superb. The world economy is exploding with growth. To be sure, terrible problems lurk in the future: a slow-motion dollar crisis, huge Medicare deficits and energy shortages. But for now, the sell-off seems extreme, not to say nutty. Some smart, brave people will make a fortune buying in these days, and then we'll all wonder what the scare was about." On August 18, 2007, on Fox News Channel's Cavuto on Business, Stein appeared with other financial experts dismissing worries of a coming credit crunch. Thirteen months later, in the Global Financial Crisis of September 2008, global stock markets crashed, Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were taken over by the US government, AIG was bailed out by the Federal Reserve, Merrill Lynch was sold to Bank of America Corporation, and Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs confirmed that they would become traditional bank holding companies. In a Yahoo! Finance article written on October 17, 2008, Stein explained that his understanding of the debt obligations based on real estate loans was less than the "staggeringly large" amount of obligations that were created through trade in derivatives of those, and so why it wasn't as similar to collapse of junk bond empire in early 1990s as he'd thought it would be: "Where I missed the boat was not realizing how large were the CDS [credit default swaps] based on the junk mortgage bonds." Business commentator Henry Blodget wrote a piece for Business Insider in January 2008 entitled "Ben Stein is an Idiot," stating that Stein's criticism of those with bearish views and positions on the market was either "delusional," or a deliberate and "shrewd" attempt to create false controversy and drive up web traffic.
QUESTION:
Did he win any awards?