Stacy Keach, Mike Hammer actor whose career spanned stage and screen, dies at age 85 | Television

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, has died aged 85.

Keach died Tuesday 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 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.

Not wanting to do the same thing over and over again, Keach left behind a wild string of roles, playing a stoner cop in the Cheech and Chong movies, 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), directed the TV show Titus, and had a role in Alexander Payne’s Oscar-nominated drama Nebraska. He won a Golden Globe playing Ernest Hemingway in a six-hour miniseries, for which he gained 35 pounds (16 kilograms).

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 and The Bourne Legacy. He played a tough trucker in the Australian thriller Roadgames, was electrocuted in Children of the Corn and had his heart ripped out by a robot in 1999’s Class of.

His greatest achievement, however, came with the role of Hammer, whom he played as a modern-day knight, a champion of the underdog.

His last role was 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.”

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. He attended the Yale School of Drama, studied at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art as a Fulbright Scholar, and returned to New York to play various stage roles.

Keach earned a Tony Award nomination for his portrayal of Buffalo Bill in the Broadway play Indians and played Edmund opposite Lee J. Cobb in King Lear, also on Broadway. He also directed the national tour of Frost/Nixon, playing the deposed president. In 2017, he appeared in Pamplona, ​​a one-man show about Hemingway, and collapsed on stage in Chicago, leading to the run’s cancellation.

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: An Actor’s Life On and Off the Stage. “It was the lowest moment of my life.”

Keach was sent to Reading Prison, a medium security prison, because authorities believed a minimum security prison would have provided too easy access to 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 choosing his own film, 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 to survive,” he testified.

Keach took his warnings to college campuses and rehabilitation centers. 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 prisoners rehabilitate.

Keach, who was married four times, is survived by Tomassi, whom he met while appearing on the series Hammer, and his children, Shannon and Karolina.