PAM GRIER TO PLAY VILLAIN ON 'SMALLVILLE': Actress to make her CW debut in January.

      The 60-year-old will play Agent Amanda Waller, the DC Comics villainess who brought on the destruction of Smallville in one part of the Superman mythology.

       The character first appeared in the 1986 comic book Legends #1 as a widow who escaped Chicago's Cabrini-Green housing projects with her surviving family after one of her sons, one of her daughters and her husband were murdered.

        Waller eventually obtained a doctorate in political science and became a congressional aide. Nicknamed "the Wall," she went on to become a government agent often placed in charge of the Suicide Squad, a semi-secret government-run group of former supervillains working in return for amnesty. She also was the former leader (code rank: White Queen) of the covert-ops organization, Checkmate.

       She later served as Secretary of Metahuman Affairs under President Lex Luthor before being arrested in the wake of Luthor's public fall from grace.

       Grier will make her first "Smallville" appearance in the second hour of the Justice Society two-parter, slated to run in January, and will be sticking around for multiple episodes, reports TV guide.