Stacy Keach, Mike Hammer Star and Shakespearean, Dies at 85

Stacy Keach, the stage-trained actor best known as TV private eye Mike Hammer, has died at 85. His wife, Malgosia Tomassi Keach, said he died Tuesday at home in Magdalenka, Poland, "after a long and difficult battle with a serious heart condition and heart failure."

Keach survived an earlier cardiac crisis. He suffered a heart attack onstage in Chicago in 2017 during the one-man show Pamplona, forcing the run's cancellation.

What defined his career?

Critics regarded Keach as a pre-eminent interpreter of Shakespeare and a favorite of director John Huston. Yet audiences indelibly linked him with hard-boiled detective Mike Hammer, the character created by crime novelist Mickey Spillane. Keach played Hammer as a modern-day knight and champion of the underdog — his biggest break.

He refused repetition, and his filmography shows it:

• A stoner cop in the Cheech and Chong movies
• A deranged colonel in The Ninth Configuration
• The title lead in the sitcom Titus
• Roles in American History X, The Bourne Legacy and Alexander Payne's Oscar-nominated Nebraska
• Narrator of World's Most Amazing Videos on TV

He won a Golden Globe playing Ernest Hemingway in a six-hour miniseries, gaining 35 pounds (16 kilograms) for the role. He worked twice for Huston, in Fat City and The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean. His screen deaths were varied: electrocution in Children of the Corn, and a robot removing his heart in Class of 1999. His final role was 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."

How did prison nearly end it all?

In 1984, while still filming the Hammer series, Keach was arrested at London's Heathrow Airport for smuggling 1.3 ounces of cocaine, concealed in an aerosol shaving cream can and elsewhere in his luggage. His secretary was also arrested. He received a nine-month sentence.

"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 memoir, All in All: An Actor's Life On and Off the Stage. "It was the lowest moment of my life."

Authorities sent him to Reading Prison, a medium-security facility, judging a minimum-security jail too accessible to reporters. He served six months. In prison he received supportive letters from Gregory Peck, Burt Reynolds, Roger Moore and Al Pacino, and ran a monthly movie screening. He called the experience "very lonely, very depressing, very sad. I spent a lot of my time trying to re-evaluate my own stupidity."

What came after release?

Keach turned his conviction into advocacy. He narrated the TV documentary High on the Job and testified before a House panel about his cocaine addiction, which began in the mid-1970s. "There is no greater imprisonment than that of being dependent on a chemical substance for one's existence," he testified. He took his warnings to college campuses and rehab centers. Decades later, playing a prison warden in Prison Break (2005-2007), he modeled the character on his own English warden, a man he remembered for his compassion.

Born in Savannah, Georgia, to actors who met at Northwestern University, Keach earned degrees in English and dramatic art at the University of California, Berkeley, trained at the Yale School of Drama and studied at London's London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art as a Fulbright scholar. On Broadway, he earned a Tony nomination as Buffalo Bill in Indians and played Edmund opposite Lee J. Cobb in King Lear. He later led the national touring cast of Frost/Nixon as the fallen president.

He was married four times. He is survived by Tomassi, whom he met on the Hammer series, and his children Shannon and Karolina.

His memoir and his 2012 interview leave the record he wanted: a career measured in range, from Hamlet to Hammer, and paid for knowingly.