Ken Kercheval, who starred as Cliff Barnes in Dallas, has died at the age of 83.

The actor played the beleaguered brother-in-law to Larry Hagman’s Machiavellian oil baron, JR Ewing. He and Hagman were the only members of the cast to feature in all 14 seasons of the soap.

His role in Dallas, from 1978 to 1991, was his most well-known, but he had many smaller roles in popular TV shows, including ER, Kojak, Starsky and Hutch, and Diagnosis Murder.

Ken Kercheval (bottom left) with the cast of Dallas. Photograph: AllStar/Lorimar

There were also film roles, including appearances in Sidney Lumet’s Network, the psychological thriller Pretty Poison, and alongside Roy Scheider in the 70s police drama The Seven-Ups. “He was one of those guys who was going to be the next James Dean,” David Jacobs, the creator of Dallas, told the Hollywood Reporter.

But it was Kercheval’s performances in Dallas, which was one of the defining TV shows of the 80s and was translated into 67 languages across 90 countries, as the hopeless Barnes that would make him known around the world.

“From the very beginning, Cliff would always get defeated by JR,” Kercheval said. “Finally, I went to [writer-producer] Leonard Katzman and said: ‘I’m not sure exactly how to play this, because for this guy to keep coming back again and again, he’d have to have gotten a lobotomy.’

“I thought, as an actor, ‘How am I going to have an audience believe that this guy is not some imbecile who keeps coming back, [only] to get whipped? I thought the only way is to add some humour to it, just to say, ‘Dust yourself off, get up and start all over again.’”

Originally a stage actor, Kercheval starred alongside Dustin Hoffman in a 1959 production of Sidney Kingsley’s Dead End and made his Broadway debut in 1961 in The Young Abe Lincoln, before appearing in The Apple Tree and Cabaret later that decade.

Kercheval’s agent confirmed the actor died on Sunday in the city of Clinton in Indiana. The cause of death has not been revealed.

He was in Dallas from 1978 to 1991, and returned when the prime-time drama had a short-lived revival between 2012 and 2014.

Ken Kercheval in Los Angeles, California, in June 2016. Photograph: Chris Delmas/AFP/Getty

Born in Wolcottville, Indiana, and raised in Clinton by his father, a physician, and his mother, a nurse, he studied at Indiana University and trained at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York.

In 1994, Kercheval, who at the time smoked three packs of cigarettes a day, detailed his treatment for lung cancer, which involved having part of his lung removed. He later advocated that others quit smoking.

Kercheval is survived by his three children, Caleb, Liza and Madison, his agent said.

• This article was amended on 25 April 2019 to remove a film photo said to include Ken Kercheval but actually showing Richard Lynch, and to correct the University of Indiana to Indiana University.