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 suffered a heart attack onstage in Chicago in June 2017.

Keach was regarded as one of America's finest stage actors, an interpreter of Shakespeare who was a favorite of directors such as John Huston. Yet he was most closely tied to television's Mike Hammer, the hard-boiled private eye created by crime novelist Mickey Spillane. He played Hammer as a modern-day knight, a champion of the underdog. In 1983, Fred Rothenberg of The Associated Press wrote that Keach made a dashing, dapper Hammer, jaunty in a tilted gray fedora, who knew how to speak lust with his eyes and talk dirty with his fists.

He refused to repeat himself. His credits include a stoner cop on film, King Lear onstage, and narration of the TV show "World's Most Amazing Videos." He played 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 he wanted as varied a selection of roles as possible, that it probably 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.

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, for which he gained 35 pounds. On Broadway he earned a Tony nomination for playing Buffalo Bill in "Indians," played Edmund opposite Lee J. Cobb in "King Lear," and appeared in "The Country Wife" (1965), "The Kentucky Cycle" (1993) and "Other Desert Cities" (2011). He headed the national touring cast of "Frost/Nixon" as Nixon, toured in "Sleuth" with Maxwell Caulfield, and starred in a 2006 "King Lear" at Chicago's Goodman Theatre. He returned there in 2017 for "Pamplona," a one-man Hemingway show, where he collapsed onstage and the run was cancelled.

In 1984, while still making "Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer," Keach was arrested at London's Heathrow Airport. Officials found 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 in the groin with lead cleats, and called it the lowest moment of his life.

He was handcuffed and taken to a cell the size of a closet, where an orange plastic bucket served as a toilet. Before he went inside, an officer asked him to autograph a copy of "The Blue and the Gray." Then 44, he was sent to Reading Prison, a medium-security facility, because authorities feared 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 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 documentary "High on the Job" and told a House panel he had become hooked on cocaine in the mid-1970s. "There is no greater imprisonment than that of being dependent on a chemical substance for one's existence," he testified. He took 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 behind bars.

Work returned quickly. 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 did well, and the shelved series got a slot on CBS's 1986-87 schedule. In "Prison Break" (2005-2007) he played a warden modeled on his real warden in England, whom he said had compassion and wanted to help inmates rehabilitate.

Keach was born in Savannah, Georgia, to actors who met at Northwestern University. He earned degrees in English and dramatic art at UC 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." He worked twice for Huston, in "Fat City" and "The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean," and appeared in "American History X" and "The Bourne Legacy." Married four times, he is survived by Malgosia and his children, Shannon and Karolina.