Stacy Keach, star of stage and ‘Mike Hammer’ series, dies at 85

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, died Tuesday. He was 85.

Keach died at home in Magdalenka, Poland, “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 June 2017.

Though he was considered a preeminent interpreter of Shakespeare and a favorite 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 on film, 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.” Last year, he had an excellent turn 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.”

He played French painter Julien Mistral in the CBS miniseries “Mistral's Daughter,” a Russian prince in the miniseries version of Judith Krantz's novel “Princess Daisy,” Barabbas in Franco Zeffirelli's “Jesus of Nazareth” and Maj. Jonas Steele in “The Blue and the Gray.” He won a Golden Globe playing Ernest Hemingway in a six-hour miniseries, for which he gained 35 pounds (16 kilograms).

Keach earned a Tony Award nomination for his portrayal of Buffalo Bill in the Broadway play “Indians,” played Edmund opposite Lee J. Cobb in “King Lear” on Broadway and had other onstage roles there in “The Kentucky Cycle” in 1993, “The Country Wife” in 1965 and “Other Desert Cities” in 2011.

He also headed the national touring company cast of “Frost/Nixon,” portraying the fallen president, and went on tour with “Sleuth” with Maxwell Caulfield as his co-star. He starred in a 2006 production of “King Lear” at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago and returned in 2017 for “Pamplona,” a one-man show about Hemingway, where he collapsed onstage, 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. Also arrested was his secretary.

“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.” He added: “It was the lowest moment of my life.”

He was handcuffed and taken to prison, a cell the size of a closet and where an orange plastic bucket would serve as his toilet. Before he went inside, an officer asked him to autograph a copy of the book “The Blue and the Gray.”

The then-44-year-old actor 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. He also married Polish actor Malgosia Tomassi, whom he met when she appeared in the “Hammer” series. He said he treasured her photos and letters behind bars.

Keach, who was married four times, is survived by Malgosia, and his children, Shannon and Karolina.

His first role after his release was in the CBS movie, “Intimate Strangers” with Teri Garr, and it became the third-highest rated TV movie of the 1985-86 season. His next film, “The Return of Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer,” also played well, and then the “Mike Hammer” series, which had been on the production shelf since his arrest, was given a slot on CBS' 1986-87 schedule.

Many years later, in the TV series “Prison Break” that aired from 2005-2007, 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 inmates rehabilitate themselves.

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.

In the summer of 1963, he worked with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and played Henry V, Mercutio and Lord Berowne. He attended the Yale School of Drama and, in the summer of 1964, played several roles at New York’s Public Theater in “Hamlet” with Julie Harris. He went to study at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art as a Fulbright scholar and returned to New York to do various stage roles.

Keach made his film debut in 1968 in “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” and played stoner cop Sergeant Stedenko from the Cheech and Chong movies. 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” with Edward Norton and “The Bourne Legacy.” He played a tough trucker in “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.

“Keach makes a dashing, dapper Hammer. He looks almost jaunty in his tilted gray fedora,” said Fred Rothenberg, a TV writer for The Associated Press, in 1983. “He knows how to speak lust with his eyes, and talk dirty with his fists.”

AP Entertainment Writer Andrew Dalton contributed reporting from Los Angeles.