Stacy Keach Slips Away

Like so many other people, I remember the now late Stacy Keach best for his long-running TV role as trenchcoated and .45-accessorized New York City private Mike Hammer, beginning in 1984. But he was also fantastic in his portrayal of dentist-turned-gunfighter Doc Holliday in the 1971 western film Doc and as outlaw Frank James in 1980’s The Long Riders. Here is part of his obituary in The Guardian:

Stacy Keach, one of America’s finest stage actors who became best known for playing scruffy private eye Mike Hammer on TV and whose career was nearly derailed after he was imprisoned in 1984 for trying to smuggle cocaine into Britain, has died aged 85.

Keach died at home in Magdalenka, Poland, on Tuesday, “after a long and difficult battle with a serious heart condition and heart failure,” his wife, Malgosia Tomassi Keach, said in a statement. Keach had previously suffered a heart attack onstage in Chicago in 2017.

Though he was considered a pre-eminent interpreter of Shakespeare and a favourite of such legendary directors as John Huston, Keach was indelibly linked with his take on the hard-boiled Hammer, the fictitious TV private detective created by crime novelist Mickey Spillane.

Unwilling to do the same thing over and over, Keach left behind a crazy quilt of roles, playing a stoner cop in the Cheech and Chong movies, King Lear onstage and also narrating World’s Most Amazing Videos on TV. He played a deranged colonel in The Ninth Configuration (also known as Twinkle, Twinkle Killer Kane), led 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 for director John Huston twice, 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 a robot removed his heart in Class of 1999.

His biggest break, though, came with the role of Hammer, whom he played as a modern-day knight, a champion of the underdog.

Because this is a crime-fiction blog, it’s appropriate that the opening title sequence above should come from early in the series Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer. Sayonara, Mr. Keach.

READ MORE: “Stacy Keach, Actor Who Embodied Hamlet and Mike Hammer, Dies at 85,” by Barry Singer (The New York Times); “Actor Stacy Keach, Who Played a Private Eye and Plenty More, Dies at 85,” by Ted Robbins (NPR).