American actor (1925–2019) who played two memorable guest roles in the original series, the tormented Dr. Simon van Gelder and the renegade starship captain Ronald Tracey.
Morgan Woodward was an American actor, born in 1925, a veteran of television westerns who made a record number of guest appearances in Gunsmoke and played the silent guard with mirrored glasses in the film Cool Hand Luke.
He appears twice in the original Star Trek. In the first-season episode Dagger of the Mind he plays Dr. Simon van Gelder, a psychiatrist driven half mad by the neural neutraliser at the Tantalus colony, with whom Spock performs the series' first mind meld. In the second-season episode The Omega Glory he plays Captain Ronald Tracey of the USS Exeter, who breaks the Prime Directive on Omega IV.
Woodward later had a long-running role in Dallas. He died in 2019.