Stacy Keach, the classically trained stage actor best known for his role as the hard-boiled private eye Mike Hammer, has died at 85.
Keach died Tuesday at his family 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. She called him “my beloved husband, my companion and the heart of our family.”
“His passing leaves an immeasurable emptiness in our lives,” the statement said. “But his extraordinary spirit, his unforgettable voice and the love he gave so generously will remain with us forever.”
Born in Savannah, Ga, to a theater family, Keach studied at Berkeley and the Yale School of Drama, and was a Fulbright scholar at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. He earned a Tony nomination in 1970 for Indians and went on to play Hamlet, Richard III and King Lear.
With a career spanning more than five decades across stage, film and television, Keach played Mike Hammer in CBS’s 1984 series and, later, the compassionate Warden Henry Pope in Prison Break from 2005 to 2007.
Playing ‘a moral vigilante’
It was for the tough-talking Mike Hammer that Keach will be best remembered. Keach played Mickey Spillane’s gun-toting New York private eye in the CBS series Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, which ran from 1984 to 1987 and was later retitled The New Mike Hammer. The role made his name on television. He returned to the role in a 1989 TV movie and in a syndicated series in 1997 and 1998.
Keach said playing the detective was a privilege for a classically trained actor. He saw Hammer as an Old Testament figure driven by revenge, and likened him to “a cross between James Bond and Dirty Harry,” he told Strand Magazine in 2015.
“I enjoyed playing an Old Testament kind of guy. A moral vigilante, I always thought of him,” he said.
Keach said under creator Spillane’s instruction, he made sure to wear Hammer’s trademark hat in the show.
“His primary concern was that I wore the hat,” he told AV Club in 2013. “He wanted to make sure that I wore the hat, because one of the other Mike Hammers—I can’t remember if it was Darren McGavin, or it might’ve been Kevin Dobson—didn’t wear the hat, and Mickey wasn’t happy about it.”
He said he had discussed the possibility of a feature film with Jay Bernstein, the manager and executive producer behind the series, before Bernstein died that April. “We were talking about the possibility of doing it as a feature movie with someone like Dennis Quaid as Mike Hammer.”
While he was well known as Mike Hammer, Keach said his most fun role was playing the outspoken father Ken Titus in the comedyTitus. “I had more fun playing Ken Titus than just about anything I’ve ever done for television, including Mike Hammer and Ernest Hemingway,” he told Brain Domain in 2020.
‘The most bizarre moment of my entire career’
Keach won a Golden Globe for his performance as American novelist Ernest Hemingway in the 1988 miniseries Hemingway. He said his affinity with the writer began in college during his studies at UC Berkeley. ReadingIn Our Time, Hemingway’s first collection of short stories, Keach said he felt the writer was speaking directly to him. “I thought, wow, this guy is writing the way I’m thinking, I mean he was talking to me,” Keach told ABC7.
Three decades later, he played Hemingway again in Jim McGrath’s one-man play Pamplona at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre. Returning to the role at age 77, the actor said he finally felt ready to play the writer, who was 60 in the production.
“I wasn’t old enough to understand and that’s probably the most critical point in his life, it’s when he decided to take his own life, and I wanted to explore the reasons for that,” he told ABC7 in 2018.
It was during that production’s opening night that Keach experienced a heart attack onstage. Speaking to Chicago Tribune, Keach recalled how he became confused during the performance and had to be taken offstage. “I felt like this great fog had come over me. It was the most bizarre moment of my entire career.”
Even though the heart attack was alarming, the actor said he was “feeling no pain.”
“The whole time, I was hoping that I was just in the middle of an actor’s nightmare, and I would soon wake up and find myself back in the position where I knew what I was doing again,” he told the newspaper.
‘The lowest moment of my life’
Keach was concerned his career would be derailed after he was arrested at London’s Heathrow Airport in 1984 for trying to smuggle drugs into the U.K., where authorities found 1.3 ounces of cocaine concealed in an aerosol shaving cream can and elsewhere in his luggage, according toAP.
Keach was sentenced to nine months in prison and served six. Recounting the incident in his 2013 memoir, the actor said the moment his sentence was read was “the lowest moment of my life.”
Reflecting on his experience in a 2006 interview, Keach said his prison stint “neither hardened or softened me.”
“It just made me more aware of priorities, I think,” he toldTV Guide.
Keach said he also worked as the prison’s librarian. “I would read letters to illiterate prisoners and write letters on their behalf to their families,” he said.
Keach also said the prison warden was “kind of a role model” for his portrayal of Henry Pope in Prison Break. “He was a very compassionate man who was very trusting of the inmates,” he said.
The fictional Fox River penitentiary on Prison Break was very different from the jail where he served time, he said, except that “the walls were the same height.”
As well as converting to Catholicism after he struck up a friendship with a priest in prison, the actor 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, AP reported.
Keach played a wide range of roles throughout his career, from his acclaimed turn as Hamlet to his voice work as Howard K. Duff VIII on The Simpsons.
“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.”
