Stacy Keach, Stage Actor and TV's Mike Hammer, Dies at 85

Stacy Keach died Tuesday at his home in Magdalenka, Poland. He was 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. Keach had already suffered a heart attack onstage in Chicago in June 2017.

He was regarded as one of America's finest stage actors, a preeminent interpreter of Shakespeare and a favorite of directors such as John Huston. Yet he was most closely tied to Mike Hammer, the hard-boiled private detective created by crime novelist Mickey Spillane, whom Keach played on television as a modern-day knight and champion of the underdog. Fred Rothenberg, writing for The Associated Press in 1983, called him a dashing, dapper Hammer in a tilted gray fedora.

Keach refused to repeat himself, and his résumé showed it. He played a stoner cop on film, King Lear onstage, and narrated "World's Most Amazing Videos" on TV. He was a deranged colonel in "The Ninth Configuration," led the series "Titus," and appeared in Alexander Payne's Oscar-nominated "Nebraska." Last year he played George Clooney's bitter father in "Jay Kelly." He told New York magazine in 2012 that the variety probably hurt his career and carried a cost, but that having played Hamlet, Richard III and King Lear, he would not give it up for anything.

On television he was Julien Mistral in "Mistral's Daughter," a Russian prince in "Princess Daisy," Barabbas in Franco Zeffirelli's "Jesus of Nazareth," and Maj. Jonas Steele in "The Blue and the Gray." He won a Golden Globe for playing Ernest Hemingway in a six-hour miniseries, gaining 35 pounds for the part. On Broadway he earned a Tony nomination as Buffalo Bill in "Indians," played Edmund opposite Lee J. Cobb in "King Lear," and appeared in "The Country Wife" in 1965, "The Kentucky Cycle" in 1993 and "Other Desert Cities" in 2011. He headed the national tour of "Frost/Nixon" as Richard Nixon and toured in "Sleuth" with Maxwell Caulfield. In Chicago he starred in "King Lear" at the Goodman Theatre in 2006 and returned in 2017 with "Pamplona," a one-man Hemingway show, where he collapsed onstage and the run was canceled.

In 1984, while still making "Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer," Keach was arrested at London's Heathrow Airport with 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 his 2013 memoir, "All in All: An Actor's Life On and Off the Stage," he wrote that it felt like being kicked 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 a toilet. Before he went in, an officer asked him to sign a copy of "The Blue and the Gray." Then 44, he was sent to Reading Prison, a medium-security facility, because authorities thought a minimum-security jail would give reporters too easy access. He served six months. Letters came from Gregory Peck, Burt Reynolds, Roger Moore and Al Pacino. He was put in charge of showing one movie a Sunday each month and once chose "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 documentary "High on the Job" and told a House panel he became hooked on cocaine in the mid-1970s, saying no imprisonment is greater than dependence on a chemical substance. He carried the warning to college campuses and rehab centers. He also married Polish actor Malgosia Tomassi, whom he met when she appeared in the "Hammer" series; he said he treasured her photos and letters in prison. He was married four times and is survived by Malgosia and his children, Shannon and Karolina.

His comeback was swift. "Intimate Strangers" with Teri Garr became the third-highest-rated TV movie of 1985-86, "The Return of Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer" also did well, and the shelved series landed on CBS's 1986-87 schedule. In "Prison Break" (2005-2007) he played a warden modeled on his English warden, whom he said had compassion and wanted inmates to rehabilitate.

Born in Savannah, Georgia, to actors who met at Northwestern University, Keach earned degrees in English and dramatic art at Berkeley, worked at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 1963, attended Yale School of Drama, played in "Hamlet" with Julie Harris at the Public Theater in 1964, and studied in London as a Fulbright scholar. His film debut came in 1968 in "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter." His later work and his anti-drug advocacy will shape how he is remembered.