William Smithers, the veteran character actor who as the ruthless oilman Jeremy Wendell gave nemesis J.R. Ewing all he could handle on the CBS primetime soap Dallas, has died. He was 98.
Smithers, who specialized in playing heavies during his career, also guest-starred as Capt. R.M. Merik, a onetime Federation officer now presiding over Roman gladiators, on the original Star Trek episode “Bread and Circuses,” which premiered in March 1968.
A member of The Actors Studio, the Virginia native got his start on the stage, and he and Olivia de Havilland made their Broadway debuts together in a 1951 production of Romeo and Juliet.
On the big screen, Smithers portrayed a principled infantry officer in Robert Aldrich’s Attack (1956) in his first movie, then appeared as a police captain in Ivan Dixon’s Trouble Man (1972), as a spy in Michael Winner’s Scorpio (1973) and as the unbending Warden Barrot in Franklin J. Schaffner’s Papillon (1973).
“The rule here is total silence,” Barrot tells Steve McQueen’s imprisoned character in Papillon. “We make no pretense of rehabilitation here. We’re not priests, we’re processors. A meat-packer processes live animals into edible ones. We process dangerous men into harmless ones. This we accomplish by breaking you. Breaking you physically, spiritually and here [pointing to his head]. Strange things happen to the head here. Put all hope out of your mind and masturbate as little as possible. It drains the strength.”
Perhaps as a tribute, the warden played by André Gregory in the 1993 Sylvester Stallone-Wesley Snipes film Demolition Man is named William Smithers.
Smithers had portrayed Peyton Mill owner David Schuster from 1965-66 on TV’s first primetime soap, ABC’s Peyton Place, before he landed on Dallas in 1981 in its fourth season as the steely Wendell, chairman of WestStar Oil.
Wendell would make the cutthroat Ewing (Larry Hagman) look like a choirboy in comparison during his 50-episode stint through 1989.
Working with Hagman “was always a challenge because [their characters] were always competitors because of the scripts,” he said. “Larry was a strong actor. I feel like I had to be at the top of my game when I was working with him. It was very stimulating.”
In 1976, when Smithers was starring on the short-lived CBS drama Executive Suite, he sued MGM. In the highly publicized case, he claimed the studio had violated his contract, which said that, with three named exceptions, no other castmember could receive more money or better billing than he did.
He indicated an MGM exec threatened to blacklist him in Hollywood should he follow through on the suit, but the actor pressed on. A jury and then the California Supreme Court found in his favor — “we won it big,” he said — and Smithers vs. MGM is now taught in entertainment law courses.
Marion Wilkinson Smithers Jr. was born in Richmond, Virginia, on July 10, 1927. His father was an electrician who moved the family in 1936 to Elizabeth, New Jersey. At Alexander Hamilton Junior High School, he appeared in a play with future House of Wax star Phyllis Kirk.
After 14 months in the U.S. Navy, Smithers attended Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia and then Catholic University in Washington before moving to New York in 1950 to pursue an acting career. To pay the bills, he worked as an usher at the Alvin Theatre on Broadway, where Henry Fonda was starring in Mr. Roberts.
For his Broadway bow, Smithers dyed his hair red and received a Theater World award for his turn as Tybalt opposite de Havilland in Romeo and Juliet, then was accepted into The Actors Studio. (A few years earlier, the actress had defeated Warner Bros. in a landmark Hollywood suit regarding her seven-year contract.)
Smithers also appeared on Broadway in the 1950s in Legend of Lovers with Richard Burton, in End as a Man with Ben Gazzara, in The Square Root of Wonderful with Anne Baxter and in The Shadow of a Gunman with Bruce Dern and received an Obie Award in 1957 for playing Treplev in an off-Broadway production of Chekhov’s The Seagull.
In 1960, Smithers spent a summer with the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut, and had what he called ” an intense — and illicit love affair” with actress Barbara Barrie. Three years later, he worked alongside Charles Boyer in London and on Broadway in Man and Boy.
He moved from New York to Los Angeles in 1965 when he was hired on Peyton Place.
Smithers said he was “paid very little” on Dallas and left the series in a dispute over money. “My agent was convinced that they would come to the figure that we asked for,” he said, “but they didn’t. So that ended the whole thing.”
He appeared on lots of TV shows, with guest spots on The Defenders, Combat!, It Takes a Thief, Mission: Impossible, The F.B.I., Mannix, The Mod Squad, Ironside, The Name of the Game, Barnaby Jones, Cannon, Sledge Hammer! and Walker, Texas Ranger, among many others.