LONDON: Acclaimed American stage and screen actor, Stacy Keach, best known as television’s hard-boiled private eye Mike Hammer, has died. He was 85.
The Guardian reported that his wife, Malgosia Tomassi Keach, announced that he died at home in Magdalenka, Poland, on Tuesday, “after a long and difficult battle with a serious heart condition and heart failure”.
Keach had previously suffered a heart attack onstage in Chicago in 2017.
Born in Savannah, Georgia, to actor parents, Keach studied at UC Berkeley, the Yale School of Drama and the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art before establishing himself on the New York stage.
A pre-eminent interpreter of Shakespeare, he earned a Tony Award nomination for Indians and played major roles in Hamlet, Richard III and King Lear.
On screen, Keach’s eclectic career ranged from playing a stoner cop in the Cheech and Chong films to winning a Golden Globe as Ernest Hemingway, a role for which he gained 16kg.
He worked twice with director John Huston, most notably in Fat City, and appeared in American History X, The Bourne Legacy, Nebraska and his final film, Jay Kelly, as George Clooney’s bitter father.
“My objective was to have as varied a selection of roles as possible,” he told New York magazine in 2012.
“My choices have had a cost attached to them. But I’ve gotten to play Hamlet, and Richard III, and King Lear, and I would not give that up for anything.”
Despite his range, Keach remained indelibly linked to Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, whom he portrayed as a modern-day knight championing the underdog.
At the height of the show’s success in 1984, his career was nearly derailed when he was arrested at Heathrow Airport for attempting to smuggle cocaine into Britain.
Sentenced to nine months in Reading Prison, he served six.
“As my sentence was read – nine months in prison – I felt like someone had kicked me in the groin with lead boots,” he wrote in his 2013 memoir, noting that he spent the lonely period trying to “re-evaluate my own stupidity”.
Following his release, Keach testified before Congress about his addiction and toured rehabilitation centres and universities to warn against substance abuse.
“There is no greater imprisonment than that of being dependent on a chemical substance for one’s existence,” he told lawmakers.
Decades later, he drew on the compassion of his real-life British prison governor when playing a warden on the hit television series Prison Break.
Keach was married four times. He is survived by his wife, whom he met on the set of Mike Hammer, and his two children, Shannon and Karolina.