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' death was reported by the Santa Barbara Independent. He lived in Santa Barbara.

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 [thei

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