Actor played JR’s embittered rival in Dallas
Ken Kercheval actor b July 15, 1935 d April 21, 2019
Ken Kercheval, who has died aged 83, was best known for his 13 years playing Cliff Barnes, JR Ewing’s dedicated but bungling rival in the popular television soap opera Dallas, which ran from 1978-91.
Initially considered for the role of the ranch-hand Ray Krebbs, Kercheval proved entirely convincing as Cliff, the embittered lawyer, and his constant feuding with JR (Larry Hagman), was an essential element in the plot of Dallas.
Driving Cliff was a searing hatred of JR, which had its wellspring in family jealousy. His father, ‘‘Digger’’, had once been a business partner of the Ewing family patriarch Jock, but the pair fell out as a result of Digger’s alcoholism and his stubborn personality (both character traits that Cliff inherits); as a result Cliff had grown up in penury.
Jock Ewing, by contrast, built up a successful oil company, enabling JR, his elder son, to live in high style with his beautiful, fragile wife Sue Ellen at the family ranch, Southfork. Cliff was obliged to settle for a modest apartment with mauve wallpaper.
To complicate matters, Cliff’s attractive sister Pamela (Victoria Principal) was married to Bobby Ewing, JR’s dashing younger brother, played by Patrick Duffy.
Such successes as Cliff enjoyed over the course of the series were invariably followed by catastrophic reversals, to which his usual response was to hit the Scotch hard and wallow in oceans of selfpity. His attempt to run for Congress, for example, was secretly sabotaged by JR.
In another storyline, he rose to become president of a company manufacturing parts for the oil industry, but before long JR has double-crossed him, bringing him to the brink of bankruptcy, and Sue Ellen, JR’s ex-wife by that point, has rejected his proposal of marriage.
Devastated, Cliff took an overdose, ending up in intensive care, a tearful and guilt-ridden Sue Ellen at his bedside. In the closing seconds of the cliffhanger episode, JR appeared in the doorway
callously to order Sue Ellen to go home, throwing in the chilling payoff line: ‘‘He did it to himself.’’ Only at the very end of the final series does Cliff triumph, taking over the reins at Ewing Oil.
In real life, Kercheval and Hagman got on well and were the only actors to appear in every single season of the show. They both returned for a spinoff TV film in 1996, JR Returns, and for the 2012 revival of Dallas, running to three series.
The son of Marine ‘‘Doc’’ Kercheval, a chain-smoking family doctor from a long line of medics, Ken Kercheval was born in Wolcottville, Indiana. He traced his family back to the English county of Leicestershire, where his ancestors had settled after the Norman conquest (in 1986 he donated £1000 towards the costs of repairs to a church there).
His first love was the stage, and he studied music and drama at Indiana University before attending the University of the Pacific in California and the Neighbourhood Playhouse School of the Theatre in New York; there, he trained under the celebrated acting teacher Sanford Meisner, whose other students had included Steve McQueen, Robert Duvall and Gregory Peck.
As he struggled to make it on the stage during his early years, he supplemented his patchy earnings with a variety of jobs – as an airline reservation agent, a dynamite blaster of sewer-lines and a salesman of plots in cemeteries.
In his early 30s he began appearing in the television soap operas that were recorded in New York at the time. They were called soap operas because their chief purpose was to advertise detergents. He made his television debut as Dr Nick Hunter in Search for Tomorrow, which promoted Joy washing-up liquid and Spic and Span household cleaner.
After that he featured in The Secret
Storm and the mildly risque mid-1970s serial How to Survive a Marriage (it featured the first scene on American network television in which the characters were understood to be naked – although under bedsheets).
Minor roles in films also came his way, among them Pretty Poison (1968), a noirish psychological drama starring Anthony Hopkins and Tuesday Weld, the police thriller The Seven-Ups (1973), with Roy Scheider, and Sidney Lumet’s Network (1976).
He was praised for his performance as Buffalo Bill Cody in Calamity Jane (1986), a made-for-television movie. Once Dallas had finished he turned up sporadically in television serials such as Diagnosis Murder, Perry Mason and Murder, She Wrote. In the Lovejoy 1993 Christmas special he played Ian McShane’s crooked American cousin.
Kercheval had an unpleasant experience in the late 1980s as a result of trying to expand his business interests. He bought a share of Old Capital Popcorn and allowed his face to be displayed on the boxes, which for a while boosted sales.
However, disagreements soured the relationship with his partners and in 1989 its troubled founder, Edward Phillips, drove his truck through the gates of Lorimar Studios (makers of Dallas), set fire to the vehicle, then blasted the sound stage with a shotgun before turning the weapon on himself. A makeshift straitjacket and plastic handcuffs were recovered afterwards, suggesting that Phillips may have been planning to kidnap Kercheval – who, as luck would have it, was away at the time.
Kercheval sought help from Alcoholics Anonymous in about 1980 and gave up drinking for many years. He was also a keen smoker.
He had four marriages, all of which were dissolved. He is survived by his seven children. – Telegraph Group