Stacy Keach, Hamlet of the Stage and TV's Mike Hammer, Dies at 85

Stacy Keach, the actor who triumphed as Hamlet on stage and as Mike Hammer on network television, died on Tuesday at 85. His wife and children announced his death in a statement. He died at the family's home in Magdalenka, Poland, after a lengthy battle with a serious heart condition and heart failure.

Keach carved out one of the most durable careers in American entertainment. For more than 50 years he moved between weekly television series, large-scale mini-series and television movies of the week while sustaining equally vibrant film and stage careers — a combination his obituarists at The New York Times called uncommon in the industry.

His range ran from classical tragedy to pulp. He played Shakespeare's melancholy Danish prince on the boards. He played Mickey Spillane's tough-guy detective Mike Hammer on network television in 1984. He became the instantly identifiable narrator of both "Nova," the science series on PBS, and "American Greed" on cable television.

His film credits were similarly wide. He co-starred in "The New Centurions," in "Fat City," directed by John Huston, and in not one but two Cheech and Chong epics, "Up in Smoke" and "Nice Dreams."

What shaped his career?

Keach's unapologetically peripatetic acting life was launched, in a sense, by the parts he missed out on. In the early 1970s he stood on the verge of movie stardom. William Peter Blatty and director William Friedkin offered him the starring role of Father Damien Karras in "The Exorcist." His agent blew the deal during contract negotiations. The part went to Jason Miller, who earned an Academy Award nomination for it.

The setbacks did not stop there. Keach then lost the role of McMurphy in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" to Jack Nicholson, whose performance won him the Oscar for Best Actor.

Rather than retreat, Keach worked steadily in the theater, on television and in movies. He explained his choices in his memoir: "If a script interests me, or a character intrigues me, or the cast features someone I've always wanted to work with, or the location is somewhere exotic, then sign me up."

That pragmatic credo sustained him where stardom eluded him. What does this change for American acting? It removes one of the last working examples of a performer who treated no venue as beneath him and none as beyond him — Shakespeare in one season, Cheech and Chong in the next.

Keach is survived by his wife and children, who announced the death from the family's home in Poland. His catalog of roles, spanning stage, network television, cable documentaries and studio films, remains the record of a career built on persistence after Hollywood's biggest prizes passed him by.