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

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.

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 scruffy private eye created by crime novelist Mickey Spillane, whom Keach played on television as a modern-day knight and a champion of the underdog. Fred Rothenberg of The Associated Press wrote in 1983 that Keach made a dashing, dapper Hammer in a tilted gray fedora, one who knew how to speak lust with his eyes and talk dirty with his fists.

Keach resisted repeating himself, and his résumé shows it. He played a stoner cop in film, King Lear onstage, and narrated "World's Most Amazing Videos." He was a deranged colonel in "The Ninth Configuration," led the series "Titus," appeared in Alexander Payne's Oscar-nominated "Nebraska," and last year 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 Lear was something he would not give up for anything.

His stage career began early. In the summer of 1963 he worked with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, playing Henry V, Mercutio and Lord Berowne. After Yale School of Drama, he played in "Hamlet" at New York's Public Theater in 1964 opposite Julie Harris, then studied in London as a Fulbright scholar. Born in Savannah, Georgia, to actors who met at Northwestern University, he earned degrees in English and dramatic art at the University of California, Berkeley. 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," "The Kentucky Cycle" and "Other Desert Cities." He toured in "Frost/Nixon" as Nixon and in "Sleuth" with Maxwell Caulfield, and in 2017 collapsed during his Hemingway one-man show "Pamplona" at Chicago's Goodman Theatre, which ended the run.

On screen he debuted in 1968 in "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter," worked twice for Huston in "Fat City" and "The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean," and later appeared in "American History X" and "The Bourne Legacy." He won a Golden Globe for playing Ernest Hemingway in a six-hour miniseries, gaining 35 pounds for it.

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 he described the moment as a kick in the groin with lead cleats, and the lowest of his life. Before he was taken away, an officer asked him to autograph a copy of "The Blue and the Gray."

At 44, he was sent to Reading Prison, a medium-security facility chosen because a minimum-security jail would have been too accessible to reporters. His cell was the size of a closet, with an orange plastic bucket for a toilet. He served six months. Letters came from Gregory Peck, Burt Reynolds, Roger Moore and Al Pacino. He ran a monthly Sunday movie and once chose "The Long Riders." He recalled the time as lonely and depressing, 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, saying there is no greater imprisonment than dependence on a chemical substance. He took the message to college campuses and rehab centers. He married Polish actor Malgosia Tomassi, whom he met when she appeared in the Hammer series, and who had sent him photos and letters in prison.

His return was swift. "Intimate Strangers," with Teri Garr, became the third-highest-rated TV movie of the 1985-86 season, and the shelved Hammer series landed on CBS's 1986-87 schedule. Playing a warden in "Prison Break" (2005-2007), he modeled the character on his English warden, whom he called compassionate. Keach, married four times, is survived by Malgosia and his children, Shannon and Karolina.