Stacy Keach, Mike Hammer actor whose career spanned stage and screen, dies aged 85

The US actor died in Poland on Tuesday, ‘after a long and difficult battle with a serious heart condition and heart failure’, his wife said

Stacy Keach, one of America’s finest stage actors who became best known for playing scruffy private eye Mike Hammer on TV and whose career was nearly derailed after he was imprisoned in 1984 for trying to smuggle cocaine into Britain, has died aged 85.

Keach died at home in Magdalenka, Poland on Tuesday, “after a long and difficult battle with a serious heart condition and heart failure,” his wife, Malgosia Tomassi Keach, said in a statement. Keach had previously suffered a heart attack onstage in Chicago in 2017.

Though he was considered a pre-eminent interpreter of Shakespeare and a favourite of such legendary directors as John Huston, Keach was indelibly linked with his take on the hard-boiled Hammer, the fictitious TV private detective created by crime novelist Mickey Spillane.

Unwilling to do the same thing over and over, Keach left behind a crazy quilt of roles, playing a stoner cop in the Cheech and Chong movies, King Lear onstage and also narrating World’s Most Amazing Videos on TV. He played a deranged colonel in The Ninth Configuration (also known as Twinkle, Twinkle Killer Kane), led the TV show Titus and had a role in Alexander Payne’s Oscar-nominated drama Nebraska. He won a Golden Globe playing Ernest Hemingway in a six-hour miniseries, for which he gained 35 pounds (16 kilograms).

He worked for director John Huston twice, in Fat City and The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, and had roles in American History X and The Bourne Legacy. He played a tough trucker in the Australian thriller Roadgames, was electrocuted in Children of the Corn and a robot removed his heart in Class of 1999.

His biggest break, though, came with the role of Hammer, whom he played as a modern-day knight, a champion of the underdog.

His final role was as George Clooney’s bitter father in Jay Kelly.

“My objective was to have as varied a selection of roles as possible. It probably did hurt my career,” he told New York magazine in 2012. “My choices have had a cost attached to it. But I’ve gotten to play Hamlet, and Richard III, and King Lear, and I would not give that up for anything.”

Born in Savannah, Georgia, Keach was the son of actors who met at Northwestern University. Keach attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned degrees in English and dramatic art. He attended the Yale School of Drama, studied at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art as a Fulbright scholar, and returned to New York to do various stage roles.

Keach earned a Tony Award nomination for his portrayal of Buffalo Bill in the Broadway play Indians, and played Edmund opposite Lee J. Cobb in King Lear, also on Broadway. He also headed the national touring company cast of Frost/Nixon, portraying the fallen president. In 2017, he appeared in Pamplona, a one-man show about Hemingway, and collapsed onstage in Chicago, leading to the run’s cancellation.

While he was still doing Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer (later titled The New Mike Hammer), Keach was arrested in 1984 at London’s Heathrow Airport after trying to smuggle 1.3 ounces of cocaine concealed in an aerosol shaving cream can and elsewhere in his luggage. His secretary was also arrested.

“As my sentence was read – nine months in prison – I felt like someone had kicked me in the groin with lead cleats,” he wrote in his 2013 book, All in All: An Actor’s Life On and Off the Stage. “It was the lowest moment of my life.”

Keach was sent to Reading Prison, a medium-security lockup, because authorities felt a minimum-security jail would have provided too easy access for reporters. He was released after six months.

In his book, Keach wrote that while in prison he got warm letters from Gregory Peck, Burt Reynolds, Roger Moore and Al Pacino. He was put in charge of showing a movie one Sunday per month and recalls once picking his own, The Long Riders. He said the experience was “very lonely, very depressing, very sad. I spent a lot of my time trying to re-evaluate my own stupidity.”

After prison, he narrated the TV documentary High on the Job, and testified before Congress, telling a House panel how he first became 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.

Keach took his warnings to college campuses and rehab centers. Many years later, in the TV series Prison Break that aired from 2005 to 2007, Keach played a prison warden and said he tried to model his character after his real-life warden in England, whom he said had great compassion and wanted to help prisoners rehabilitate themselves.

Keach, who was married four times, is survived by Tomassi, whom he met when she appeared in the Hammer series, and his children, Shannon and Karolina.