Stacy Keach, Mike Hammer Star and Stage Actor Known for Shakespeare, Dies at 85

Stacy Keach died at home in Magdalenka, Poland, at 85. His wife, Malgosia Tomassi Keach, said in a statement that he died after a long and difficult battle with a serious heart condition and heart failure. His heart had already failed him once in public: in June 2017 he suffered a heart attack onstage in Chicago.

Keach was regarded as one of America's finest stage actors, a preeminent interpreter of Shakespeare and a favourite of directors such as John Huston. Yet he remained indelibly linked to Mike Hammer, the hard-boiled private detective created by crime novelist Mickey Spillane. He played Hammer on television as a modern-day knight and a champion of the underdog. Reviewing the show in 1983, Fred Rothenberg of The Associated Press wrote that Keach looked almost jaunty in his tilted gray fedora and knew how to speak lust with his eyes and talk dirty with his fists.

He never wanted to repeat himself, and his résumé shows it. He played a stoner cop, Sergeant Stedenko, in the Cheech and Chong films, a deranged colonel in The Ninth Configuration, and King Lear onstage. He narrated World's Most Amazing Videos, led the TV show Titus, appeared in Alexander Payne's Nebraska and American History X, and last year played George Clooney's bitter father in Jay Kelly. He won a Golden Globe for playing Ernest Hemingway in a six-hour miniseries, for which he gained 16kg. He told New York magazine in 2012 that the variety probably did hurt his career, and that his choices carried a cost. But he had played Hamlet, Richard III and King Lear, and would not give that up for anything.

The stage work was substantial. He earned a Tony nomination as Buffalo Bill in Indians, played Edmund opposite Lee J. Cobb in King Lear on Broadway, and appeared there in The Country Wife in 1965, The Kentucky Cycle in 1993 and Other Desert Cities in 2011. He headed the national touring cast of Frost/Nixon as the fallen president, toured in Sleuth with Maxwell Caulfield, and starred in King Lear at Chicago's Goodman Theatre in 2006. He returned there in 2017 with Pamplona, a one-man Hemingway show, and collapsed onstage, which ended the run.

The low point came in 1984, while he was still making Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer. He was arrested at London's Heathrow Airport carrying 1.3 ounces of cocaine hidden in an aerosol shaving cream can and elsewhere in his luggage. His secretary was also arrested. He was sentenced to nine months in prison. In his 2013 memoir, All in All: An Actor's Life On and Off the Stage, he said it felt like being kicked in the groin with lead cleats, and called it the lowest moment of his life.

He was handcuffed and taken to a closet-sized cell where an orange plastic bucket served as his toilet. Before he went in, an officer asked him to autograph a copy of the book The Blue and the Gray. At 44, he was sent to Reading Prison, a medium-security lockup, because authorities thought a minimum-security jail would give reporters too easy access. He served six months. He wrote that letters came from Gregory Peck, Burt Reynolds, Roger Moore and Al Pacino, and that he was put in charge of showing a movie one Sunday a month, once choosing The Long Riders. He described the time as very lonely, depressing and sad, much of it spent re-evaluating his own stupidity.

Afterward he narrated the TV documentary High on the Job and testified before a House panel in Congress, explaining that he first became hooked on cocaine in the mid-1970s. He said there is no greater imprisonment than being dependent on a chemical substance for one's existence. He carried that warning to college campuses and rehab centres. He also married Polish actor Malgosia Tomassi, whom he met when she appeared in the Hammer series, and said he treasured her photos and letters behind bars. He was married four times, and is survived by Malgosia and his children, Shannon and Karolina.

His return was swift. His first role after release, in the CBS movie Intimate Strangers with Teri Garr, became the third-highest rated TV movie of the 1985-86 season. The Return of Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer also played well, and the series, shelved since his arrest, got a slot on CBS's 1986-87 schedule. Years later, in Prison Break, he played a warden modelled on his real English warden, whom he said showed compassion and wanted to help inmates rehabilitate.

Keach was born in Savannah, Georgia, to actors who met at Northwestern University, and earned degrees in English and dramatic art at UC Berkeley. In 1963 he played Henry V, Mercutio and Lord Berowne at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, then studied at Yale and, as a Fulbright scholar, at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. His film debut came in 1968 in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.