Stacy Keach, considered one of America’s best stage actors who grew to become greatest identified for enjoying scruffy personal eye Mike Hammer on TV and whose profession was almost derailed after he was imprisoned in 1984 for making an attempt to smuggle cocaine into Britain, died Tuesday. He was 85.
Keach died at house in Magdalenka, Poland, “after an extended and troublesome battle with a severe coronary heart situation and coronary heart failure,” his spouse, Malgosia Tomassi Keach, mentioned in a press release. Keach had beforehand suffered a coronary heart assault onstage in Chicago in June 2017.
Although he was thought-about a preeminent interpreter of Shakespeare and a favourite of such legendary administrators as John Huston, Keach was indelibly linked along with his tackle the hard-boiled Hammer, the fictional TV personal detective created by crime novelist Mickey Spillane.
Unwilling to do the identical factor again and again, Keach left behind a loopy quilt of roles, taking part in a stoner cop on movie, King Lear onstage and likewise narrating “World’s Most Superb Movies” on TV. He performed a deranged colonel in “The Ninth Configuration” (also called “Twinkle, Twinkle Killer Kane”), led the TV present “Titus,” had a job in Alexander Payne’s Oscar-nominated drama “Nebraska,” and performed a New York archbishop in a recurring position on the CBS police drama “Blue Bloods.” Final yr, he had a superb flip as George Clooney’s bitter father in “Jay Kelly.”
“My goal was to have as assorted a number of roles as doable. It in all probability did damage my profession,” he instructed New York journal in 2012. “My decisions have had a value connected to it. However I’ve gotten to play Hamlet, and Richard III, and King Lear, and I’d not give that up for something.”
Actor Lou Diamond Phillips, who performed Keach’s son within the 2008 TV film “Lone Rider,” mentioned in a put up on X that Keach was a “consummate actor, gracious, giving and extremely variety even whereas he had the presence of a smoldering volcano. One of many greats. Proud to have shared some frames with him.”
From TV to stage
He performed French painter Julien Mistral within the CBS miniseries “Mistral’s Daughter,” a Russian prince within the miniseries model of Judith Krantz’s novel “Princess Daisy,” Barabbas in Franco Zeffirelli’s “Jesus of Nazareth” and Maj. Jonas Steele in “The Blue and the Grey.” He received a Golden Globe taking part in Ernest Hemingway in a six-hour miniseries, for which he gained 35 kilos (16 kilograms).
Keach earned a Tony Award nomination for his portrayal of Buffalo Invoice within the Broadway play “Indians,” performed Edmund reverse Lee J. Cobb in “King Lear” on Broadway and had different onstage roles there in “The Kentucky Cycle” in 1993, “The Nation Spouse” in 1965 and “Different Desert Cities” in 2011.
He additionally headed the nationwide touring firm solid 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 manufacturing of “King Lear” on the Goodman Theatre in Chicago and returned in 2017 for “Pamplona,” a one-man present about Hemingway, the place he collapsed onstage, resulting in the run’s cancellation.
A pivotal arrest
Whereas he was nonetheless doing “Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer” (later titled “The New Mike Hammer”), Keach was arrested in 1984 at London’s Heathrow Airport after making an attempt to smuggle 1.3 ounces of cocaine hid in an aerosol shaving cream can and elsewhere in his baggage. Additionally arrested was his secretary.
“As my sentence was learn — 9 months in jail — I felt like somebody had kicked me within the groin with lead cleats,” he wrote in his 2013 ebook, “All in All: An Actor’s Life On and Off the Stage.” He added: “It was the bottom second of my life.”
He was handcuffed and brought to jail, a cell the scale of a closet and the place an orange plastic bucket would function his rest room. Earlier than he went inside, an officer requested him to autograph a duplicate of the ebook “The Blue and the Grey.”
The then-44-year-old actor was despatched to Studying Jail, a medium-security lockup, as a result of authorities felt a minimum-security jail would have offered too easy accessibility for reporters. He was launched after six months.
In his ebook, Keach wrote that whereas in jail he bought heat letters from Gregory Peck, Burt Reynolds, Roger Moore and Al Pacino. He was put in control of displaying a film one Sunday per 30 days and recollects as soon as selecting his personal, “The Lengthy Riders.” He mentioned the expertise was “very lonely, very miserable, very unhappy. I spent quite a lot of my time making an attempt to re-evaluate my very own stupidity.”
After jail, he narrated the TV documentary “Excessive on the Job,” and testified earlier than Congress, telling a Home panel how he first grew to become hooked on cocaine within the mid-Seventies. “There is no such thing as a better imprisonment than that of being depending on a chemical substance for one’s existence,” he testified.
Keach took his warnings to school campuses and rehab facilities. He additionally married Polish actor Malgosia Tomassi, whom he met when she appeared within the “Hammer” collection. He mentioned he treasured her images and letters behind bars.
Keach, who was married 4 instances, is survived by Malgosia, and his youngsters, Shannon and Karolina.
Keach’s life after jail
His first position after his launch was within the CBS film, “Intimate Strangers” with Teri Garr, and it grew to become the third-highest rated TV film of the 1985-86 season. His subsequent movie, “The Return of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer,” additionally performed effectively, after which the “Mike Hammer” collection, which had been on the manufacturing shelf since his arrest, was given a slot on CBS’ 1986-87 schedule.
A few years later, within the TV collection “Jail Break” that aired from 2005-2007, Keach performed a jail warden and mentioned he tried to mannequin his character after his real-life warden in England, whom he mentioned had nice compassion and wished to assist inmates rehabilitate themselves.
Born in Savannah, Georgia, Keach was the son of actors who met at Northwestern College. Keach attended the College of California, Berkeley, the place he earned levels in English and dramatic artwork.
In the summertime of 1963, he labored with the Oregon Shakespeare Pageant and performed Henry V, Mercutio and Lord Berowne. He attended the Yale College of Drama and, in the summertime of 1964, performed a number of roles at New York’s Public Theater in “Hamlet” with Julie Harris. He went to check on the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Artwork as a Fulbright scholar and returned to New York to do numerous stage roles.
Keach made his movie debut in 1968 in “The Coronary heart Is a Lonely Hunter” and performed stoner cop Sergeant Stedenko from the Cheech and Chong motion pictures. He labored for director John Huston twice, in “Fats Metropolis” and “The Life and Occasions of Decide Roy Bean” and had roles in “American Historical past X” with Edward Norton and “The Bourne Legacy.” He performed a troublesome trucker in “Roadgames,” was electrocuted in “Youngsters of the Corn” and a robotic eliminated his coronary heart in “Class of 1999.”
His largest break, although, got here with the position of Hammer, whom he performed as a modern-day knight, a champion of the underdog.
“Keach makes a dashing, dapper Hammer. He appears virtually jaunty in his tilted grey fedora,” mentioned Fred Rothenberg, a TV author for The Related Press, in 1983. “He is aware of the way to communicate lust along with his eyes, and discuss soiled along with his fists.”
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AP Leisure Author Andrew Dalton contributed reporting from Los Angeles.
