Stacy Keach, a celebrated stage actor who became best known for playing hard-boiled private eye Mike Hammer on television, died Tuesday at his home in Magdalenka, Poland. He was 85, CBS News reported.
Keach died “after a long and difficult battle with a serious heart condition and heart failure,” his wife, Malgosia Tomassi Keach, said in a statement. He had suffered a heart attack onstage in Chicago in June 2017 while performing “Pamplona,” a one-man show about Ernest Hemingway.
Considered a leading interpreter of Shakespeare, Keach played Hamlet, Richard III and King Lear and earned a Tony nomination for playing Buffalo Bill in the Broadway play “Indians.” He won a Golden Globe for playing Hemingway in a six-hour miniseries, a role for which he gained 35 pounds.
To TV audiences, he was Mike Hammer, the detective created by novelist Mickey Spillane. “Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer” and “The New Mike Hammer” aired on CBS in the 1980s.
His career nearly derailed in 1984, when he was arrested at London’s Heathrow Airport trying to smuggle 1.3 ounces of cocaine into Britain. He served six months of a nine-month sentence at Reading Prison. “It was the lowest moment of my life,” he wrote in his 2013 memoir, “All in All.” After his release he spoke on college campuses and at rehab centers about addiction, and the “Mike Hammer” series returned to CBS in 1986.
Keach’s screen work ranged widely: the stoner cop Sgt. Stedenko in the Cheech and Chong films, John Huston’s “Fat City,” “American History X,” a prison warden on “Prison Break,” the sitcom “Titus,” Alexander Payne’s “Nebraska,” a recurring archbishop on “Blue Bloods,” and, last year, George Clooney’s father in “Jay Kelly.”
“My objective was to have as varied a selection of roles as possible,” he told New York magazine in 2012. “I’ve gotten to play Hamlet, and Richard III, and King Lear, and I would not give that up for anything.”
Actor Lou Diamond Phillips wrote on X that Keach was “gracious, giving and incredibly kind even while he had the presence of a smoldering volcano. One of the greats.”
Born in Savannah, Georgia, to actor parents, Keach studied at UC Berkeley, the Yale School of Drama and, as a Fulbright scholar, the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. He is survived by his wife and children Shannon and Karolina.
Sources: CBS News. Thee Arizona Times uses AI-assisted reporting reviewed against the sources listed.
Photo: Vojtěch Hynais / Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
