William Smithers, the veteran character actor who because 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 profession, also guest-starred as Capt. R.M. Merik, a onetime Federation officer now presiding over Roman gladiators, on the unique 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 large 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 because 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 occur to the top 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 within the 1993 Sylvester Stallone-Wesley Snipes film Demolition Man is known as 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 because the steely Wendell, chairman of WestStar Oil.
Wendell would make the cutthroat Ewing (Larry Hagman) appear to be a choirboy as compared during his 50-episode stint through 1989.
Working with Hagman “was all the time a challenge because [their characters] were all the time competitors due to scripts,” he said. “Larry was a powerful actor. I feel like I needed to be at the highest of my game after 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. Within the highly publicized case, he claimed the studio had violated his contract, which said that, with three named exceptions, no other castmember could receive extra money or higher billing than he did.
He indicated an MGM exec threatened to blacklist him in Hollywood should he follow through on the suit, however the actor pressed on. A jury after which the California Supreme Court present 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, Recent Jersey. At Alexander Hamilton Junior High School, he appeared in a play with future House of Wax star Phyllis Kirk.
After 14 months within the U.S. Navy, Smithers attended Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia after which Catholic University in Washington before moving to Recent York in 1950 to pursue an acting profession. To pay the bills, he worked as an usher on 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 couple of years earlier, the actress had defeated Warner Bros. in a landmark Hollywood suit regarding her seven-year contract.)
Smithers also appeared on Broadway within the Nineteen Fifties 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 taking part in 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 Recent York to Los Angeles in 1965 when he was hired on Peyton Place.
Smithers said he was “paid little or no” on Dallas and left the series in a dispute over money. “My agent was convinced that they might come to the figure that we asked for,” he said, “but they didn’t. In order that ended the entire thing.”
He appeared on a lot of TV shows, with guest spots on The Defenders, Combat!, It Takes a Thief, Mission: Inconceivable, The F.B.I., Mannix, The Mod Squad, Ironside, The Name of the Game, Barnaby Jones, Cannon, Sledge Hammer! and Walker, Texas Ranger, amongst many others.