Stacy Keach, the 'Mike Hammer' Star and Acclaimed Stage Actor, Dies at 85
Stacy Keach, who played Mickey Spillane's hard-boiled detective Mike Hammer and won a Golden Globe as Ernest Hemingway, died Tuesday at his home in Poland. He was 85, and his wife said he had battled a serious heart condition and heart failure.
LOS ANGELES — Stacy Keach, one of America's most decorated stage actors and the face of television's Mike Hammer, died on Tuesday at the age of 85, Reuters reported. Keach died in Poland “after a long and difficult battle with a serious heart condition and heart failure,” his wife, Malgosia Tomassi, said in a statement to Variety, calling him “not only a legendary actor, admired and loved by audiences the world over, but also my beloved husband, my companion and the heart of our family.” USA TODAY reported that Keach died at the family home in Magdalenka, Poland, in a statement shared by the actor's representative.
Keach was indelibly linked to Mike Hammer, Mickey Spillane's hard-boiled private eye in fedora and trenchcoat. Reuters traced the role from the television movies and the mid-to-late-1980s run of “The New Mike Hammer” to the 1997–98 revival “Mike Hammer, Private Eye,” along with four made-for-television movies and his narration of audio versions of Spillane's books. “I have been and always shall be Mike Hammer,” Keach wrote in his 2013 autobiography, “All in All: An Actor's Life On and Off the Stage,” as quoted by Reuters. “Certain roles stick to you and I'm happy that Hammer is mine.”
The Hammer years were interrupted at their height. Reuters reported that the first series stopped when Keach went to prison for six months in England in 1985, after more than 30 grams of cocaine were found in his possessions at London's Heathrow Airport; the Associated Press account read this run put the 1984 arrest at 1.3 ounces concealed in his luggage. In his book Keach said he had been addicted, and he told Fox News in 2013 that getting caught “saved my life, actually,” Reuters reported. The series returned on CBS' 1986–87 schedule.
On stage, Keach's standing was set early: his 1972 Hamlet, Reuters noted, led a New York Times critic to label him “the finest American classic actor since John Barrymore.” He played Barabbas in “Jesus of Nazareth,” Richard Nixon in “Frost/Nixon,” and Shakespeare's King Lear and Hamlet across a long stage career, and his portrayal of Ernest Hemingway in the 1988 television miniseries “Hemingway” earned a Golden Globe award and an Emmy nomination. His film work, per Reuters, included John Huston's “Fat City,” “The New Centurions,” “The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean,” “American History X” and “The Long Riders” with his brother James, alongside the Cheech and Chong comedies “Up in Smoke” and “Nice Dreams”; regular television roles included “Titus,” “Prison Break” and “Two and a Half Men.”
Keach was born on June 2, 1941, in Savannah, Georgia, and grew up in Southern California, the son of director and actor Stacy Keach Sr. and the brother of actor James Keach; he graduated from the University of California at Berkeley, studied at the Yale School of Drama and was a Fulbright Scholar at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, Reuters reported. His health had marked his later stage work: he suffered an apparent heart attack on stage in May 2017, on the opening night of “Pamplona,” his one-man play about Hemingway's later years, which forced the run's cancellation, and a mild stroke in 2009 during “Frost/Nixon,” from which he returned to the stage 10 days later. He is survived by Tomassi, a Polish-born actress who appeared with him in the Hammer shows.
