Stacy Keach, star of TV's Mike Hammer and acclaimed stage actor, 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 the cause was a long and difficult battle with a serious heart condition and heart failure. In June 2017, Keach had 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 was most closely tied to a role on television: Mike Hammer, the scruffy, hard-boiled private eye created by crime novelist Mickey Spillane.

He resisted repeating himself, and the résumé shows it. He played a stoner cop on film and 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, appeared in Alexander Payne's Oscar-nominated Nebraska, and played a New York archbishop in a recurring part on Blue Bloods. Last year he was George Clooney's bitter father in Jay Kelly. He told New York magazine in 2012 that he had wanted roles as varied as possible, that it probably hurt his career, and that the choices carried a cost. But he had played Hamlet, Richard III and King Lear, he said, and would not give that up for anything.

The stage work was substantial. He earned a Tony nomination for playing Buffalo Bill in Indians, and played Edmund opposite Lee J. Cobb in King Lear on Broadway. His other Broadway credits include 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 and toured in Sleuth with Maxwell Caulfield. He starred in King Lear at Chicago's Goodman Theatre in 2006, and returned in 2017 with Pamplona, a one-man Hemingway show, where he collapsed onstage and the run was cancelled. On screen, he won a Golden Globe for playing Ernest Hemingway in a six-hour miniseries, gaining 35 pounds for it. He was also Barabbas in Franco Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth, and appeared in Mistral's Daughter, Princess Daisy and The Blue and the Gray.

Lou Diamond Phillips, who played his son in the 2008 TV movie Lone Rider, wrote on X that Keach was a consummate actor, gracious, giving and incredibly kind, with the presence of a smoldering volcano. "One of the greats," he wrote.

The low point came 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 prison. 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 closet-sized cell with an orange plastic bucket for a toilet. Before he went in, 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 lockup, because authorities felt a minimum-security jail would give reporters too easy access. He served six months. He wrote that Gregory Peck, Burt Reynolds, Roger Moore and Al Pacino sent warm letters. He ran a movie screening one Sunday a 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 TV 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, he testified, than being dependent on a chemical substance. He carried that message to college campuses and rehab centres. He also married Malgosia Tomassi, a Polish actor he met when she appeared in the Hammer series; he said he treasured her photos and letters in prison.

His comeback was quick. Intimate Strangers, with Teri Garr, was 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 Hammer series won a slot on CBS's 1986-87 schedule. Years later, playing a warden on Prison Break, he modelled the character on his real warden in England, whom he said was compassionate and wanted inmates to rehabilitate.

Born in Savannah, Ga., to actors who met at Northwestern University, Keach earned degrees in English and dramatic art at the University of California, Berkeley. Married four times, he is survived by Malgosia and his children, Shannon and Karolina.