Stacy Keach, one of America’s finest stage actors who became best known for playing the scruffy private detective Mike Hammer on television and whose career was nearly derailed after he was jailed in 1984 for trying to smuggle cocaine into Britain, died Tuesday. He was 85 years old.
Keach died at his home in Magdalenka, Poland, “after a long and difficult battle with severe heart disease and heart failure,” his wife, Malgosia Tomassi Keach, said in a statement. Keach previously suffered a heart attack on stage in Chicago in June 2017.
Although considered a preeminent interpreter of Shakespeare and a favorite of legendary directors such as John Huston, Keach was indelibly linked to his portrayal of the tough Hammer, the fictional television private eye created by crime novelist Mickey Spillane.
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Not wanting to do the same thing over and over again, Keach left behind a wild string of roles, playing a stoner cop on film, King Lear on stage and also narrating “The World’s Most Amazing Home Videos” on television. He played a deranged colonel in “The Ninth Configuration” (also known as “Twinkle, Twinkle Killer Kane”), led the TV show “Titus,” had a role in Alexander Payne’s Oscar-nominated drama “Nebraska” and played a New York archbishop in a recurring role on the CBS crime drama “Blue Bloods.” Last year he had a great role as George Clooney’s bitter father in “Jay Kelly.”
“My goal was to have as diverse a selection of roles as possible. It probably hurt my career,” he told New York magazine in 2012. “My choices came at a cost. But I got to play Hamlet, Richard III and King Lear, and I wouldn’t give that up for anything.”
“One of the greats”
Actor Lou Diamond Phillips, who played Keach’s son in the 2008 TV movie “Lone Rider,” said in an article on
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 Major 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.
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 stage roles there in “The Kentucky Cycle” in 1993, “The Country Wife” in 1965 and “Other Desert Cities” in 2011.
He also directed the national tour of “Frost/Nixon,” as Nixon, and toured with “Sleuth” with Maxwell Caulfield as co-star. He starred in a 2006 production of “King Lear” at Chicago’s Goodman Theater and returned in 2017 for “Pamplona,” a one-man show about Hemingway, where he collapsed on stage, leading to the run’s cancellation.
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He calls his cocaine arrest the ‘lowest moment’ of his life
While still filming “Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer” (later titled “The New Mike Hammer”), Keach was arrested in 1984 at London’s Heathrow Airport after attempting to smuggle 1.3 ounces of cocaine hidden in a can of aerosol shaving cream and elsewhere in his luggage. His secretary was also arrested.
“When my sentence was read out — nine months in prison — I felt like someone had hit me in the groin with lead studs,” he wrote in his 2013 book, “All in All: The Life of an Actor On and Off the Stage.” He added: “It was the lowest moment of my life.”
He was handcuffed and taken to prison and placed in a cell the size of a closet and where an orange plastic bucket served as his toilet. Before entering, a police officer asked him to sign a copy of the book “The Blue and the Grey”.
The actor, then 44, was sent to Reading Prison, a medium-security prison, because authorities believed a minimum-security prison would have provided easy access for journalists. He was released after six months.
In his book, Keach wrote that while in prison he received warm letters from Gregory Peck, Burt Reynolds, Roger Moore and Al Pacino. He was assigned to show a film one Sunday a month and remembers one day choosing one of his own, “The Long Riders.” He said the experience was “very lonely, very depressing, very sad. I spent a lot of time trying to reevaluate my own stupidity.”
After prison, he narrated the television documentary “High on the Job” and testified before Congress, telling a House panel how he first became addicted to cocaine in the mid-1970s. “There is no greater imprisonment than that of depending on a chemical substance for one’s existence,” he testified.
Keach took his warnings to college campuses and rehabilitation centers. He also married Polish actress Malgosia Tomassi, whom he met while appearing in the series “Hammer.” He said he treasures his photos and letters behind bars.
Keach, who was married four times, is survived by Malgosia and his children, Shannon and Karolina.
Her first role after her release was in the CBS film “Intimate Strangers” with Teri Garr, and it became the third highest-rated TV movie of the 1985-86 season. His next film, Mickey Spillane’s “The Return of Mike Hammer,” also performed well, and then the series “Mike Hammer,” which had been awaiting production since his arrest, got a spot on CBS’s 1986-87 schedule.
Many years later, in the television series “Prison Break” which aired from 2005 to 2007, Keach played a prison warden and said he tried to model his character after that of his real warden in England, who he said had great compassion and wanted to help inmates rehabilitate.
How Keach got his start
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 drama.
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 the Public Theater in New York 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 play various stage roles.
Keach made his film debut in 1968 in “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” and played the role of stoner cop Sergeant Stedenko from the films Cheech and Chong. He worked twice for director John Huston, 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,” got electrocuted in “Children of the Corn” and had his heart ripped out by a robot in “Class of 1999.”
His greatest achievement, however, 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 casual in his tilted gray fedora,” said Fred Rothenberg, a television writer for the Associated Press, in 1983. “He knows how to talk lust with his eyes and talk dirty with his fists.”
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