LOS ANGELES (The Thursday Times) — Stacy Keach, the American actor who played the hard-boiled private eye Mike Hammer on television and was counted among his country’s finest Shakespearean stage actors, has died. He was 85.
Keach died on Tuesday at the family’s home in Magdalenka, near Warsaw, “after a long and difficult battle with a serious heart condition and heart failure,” his wife, Malgosia Tomassi Keach, said in a statement.
“Stacy was not only a legendary actor, admired and loved by audiences the world over, but also my beloved husband, my companion and the heart of our family,” she said.
A career built on variety
Born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1941 to the actors Stacy Keach Sr and Mary Cain, Keach studied English and drama at the University of California, Berkeley, trained at the Yale School of Drama, and spent a year at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art as a Fulbright scholar.
The stage came first. He won Obie awards Off Broadway for the anti-war satire MacBird! in 1966 and for Hamlet in 1972, and earned a Tony nomination for playing Buffalo Bill in Arthur Kopit’s Indians on Broadway in 1969. Over the following decades he played King Lear, Richard III, Macbeth, and Falstaff, and in 2010 he won a Helen Hayes award for his Lear in Washington.
On screen he was a fading boxer in John Huston’s Fat City (1972), the bumbling Sgt Stedenko in Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke (1978), the outlaw Frank James opposite his brother James in The Long Riders (1980), and a deranged Marine colonel in The Ninth Configuration (1980). Later films included American History X, The Bourne Legacy, and Alexander Payne’s Nebraska. His last role was as the father of George Clooney’s character in Jay Kelly (2025).
He gained about 16 kilograms to play Ernest Hemingway in a 1988 television miniseries, and won a Golden Globe for the part.
“My objective was to have as varied a selection of roles as possible. It probably did hurt my career,” he said in a 2012 interview. “But I’ve gotten to play Hamlet, and Richard III, and King Lear, and I would not give that up for anything.”
Mike Hammer, and prison
His widest fame came as Mickey Spillane’s fedora-wearing detective in Mike Hammer, which ran on CBS from 1984 to 1987. He returned to the role in a 1989 television film and a syndicated series in 1997 and 1998.
In 1984, while the show was on the air, Keach was arrested at London’s Heathrow Airport carrying cocaine. He pleaded guilty, was sentenced to nine months, and served six in Reading Prison. He later called it the lowest moment of his life, and said a friendship with a prison priest led him to become a Roman Catholic.
After his release he testified before a US congressional panel about his addiction and took warnings about drugs to college campuses and rehabilitation centres. Years later, playing a prison warden in Prison Break, he said he modelled the character on his own compassionate warden in England.
He kept working into his eighties, as Cardinal Kevin Kearns in Blue Bloods and as the narrator of the long-running series American Greed. He survived a series of strokes in 2009 while touring as Richard Nixon in Frost/Nixon, and a heart attack on stage in Chicago in 2017 during Pamplona, a one-man show about Hemingway.
Keach was married four times. He is survived by his wife, whom he met when she appeared in the Hammer series and married in 1986, their children Shannon and Karolina, and his brother James.
