Stacy Keach has had a long and prolific career spanning stage and screen.
Archives by Michael Ochs/Getty Images
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Archives by Michael Ochs/Getty Images
Stacy Keach has had a long and prolific career spanning stage and screen.
Archives by Michael Ochs/Getty Images
Stacy Keach had range.
He played outlaw Frank James in the western The long ridersthe clumsy sergeant. Stedenko in stoner comedy Cheech and Chong In smoke, and Hamlet on stage several times. He has narrated numerous documentaries for National Geographic and PBS.
Keach died Tuesday at his family’s home in Poland “after a long and difficult battle with severe heart disease and heart failure,” his wife Malgosia Keach said in a statement through a representative. He was 85 years old.
Keach seemed to be everything you wanted him to be: born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1941, he grew up in Southern California. He was classically trained at the Yale School of Drama and studied on a Fulbright scholarship at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, but he was best known for playing badasses: cops, cowboys, detectives – the strong guy, but not the quiet one.
In the 1980s and 1990s, his trademark fedora and mustache (which covered a scar from cleft palate surgery as a child) served him well in his role as private detective Mike Hammer – a character created by crime novelist Mickey Spillane.
He had a stable career, except in 1984, when he was arrested at Heathrow Airport for bringing cocaine into Britain on board a flight. He served six months in prison, which he said gave more depth to his later roles.
“Anyone who has an experience like that certainly takes it with them,” he told NPR’s Scott Simon in 1986. “And from an artistic point of view, you have to use it – or hopefully use it – in a way that is going to be positive and productive. I think the most important thing from my point of view was to not take freedom for granted.”
Keach returned to work and continued acting as he aged. He’s done network sitcoms — playing a helicopter-trafficking reporter’s father on the ride on NBC shows. Crowded as well as prestige films, such as that of Alexander Payne Nebraska in 2013.
His first love, however, was the stage, particularly Shakespeare, and everyone who saw him on stage remembers him. He said his most difficult role was Macbeth: “Of all the major tragic roles in the canon, it’s probably the most difficult,” he told NPR’s Robert Siegel midway through a 1995 production at the Shakespeare Theater in Washington, DC.
Macbeth has “a moral blindness, a blind spot in his character,” which makes him a particularly interesting role, Keach explained. Shakespeare gave Macbeth the ability to put “extraordinary ideas about the human condition” into poetry.
It was just one of many challenging roles that Stacy Keach would take on during a career that would span more than half a century, on stage and screen.
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