Stacy Keach, actor who embodied Hamlet and Mike Hammer, dies at 85

Stacy Keach, a larger-than-life actor who triumphed as Hamlet on the boards and as Mike Hammer, Mickey Spillane’s tough-guy detective, on network television, died Tuesday. He was 85.

In a statement, his wife and children said he died at the family’s home in Magdalenka, Poland, after a lengthy battle with a serious heart condition and heart failure.

Keach’s ability to play disparate roles in weekly television series, large-scale miniseries and television movies of the week for more than 50 years while sustaining equally vibrant film and stage careers was uncommon in American entertainment.

He became the instantly identifiable voice of both “Nova” on PBS and “American Greed” on cable television. He co-starred in movies as diverse as “The New Centurions,” “Fat City,” directed by John Huston, and not one but two Cheech and Chong epics, “Up in Smoke” and “Nice Dreams.”

His unapologetically peripatetic acting life was launched, in a sense, by the parts he missed out on. On the verge of movie stardom in the 1970s, he was offered the starring role of Father Damien Karras in “The Exorcist,” only to have his agent blow the deal during contract negotiations. The part went to Jason Miller. He then lost out to Jack Nicholson for the role of McMurphy in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

These near-misses brought a realization. Rather than wait for the role that might make him a movie star, he would accept whatever roles came his way.

“I try not to dwell on mistakes and wallow in regret,” Keach wrote in his memoir “All in All: An Actor’s Life On and Off the Stage.” “If a script interests me, or a character intrigues me, or the cast features someone I’ve always wanted to work with, or the location is somewhere exotic, then sign me up. I’m not going to wait for a call that may or may not come.”

Walter Stacy Keach Jr. was born June 2, 1941, in Savannah, Georgia, to Mary Cain Peckham, the youngest daughter of a Texas oilman, William H. Peckham, and Walter Stacy Keach Sr., an actor and jack of all theatrical trades, who also worked under the name Stacy Keach.

Soon after the younger Keach was born, his father was invited to join the Pasadena Playhouse as an actor and a director. The family moved to California, where the elder Keach later created, produced and directed a 1950s radio series, “Tales of the Texas Rangers,” for NBC. Watching his father work on this series inspired the son to want to become an actor.

On the surface, it was an unlikely calling. Keach had been born with a cleft lip and a partial cleft palate that required four surgeries during his first four years of life and brought him endless abuse and derision as a young boy. While his parents encouraged him to overcome his birth defects by treating him as if he had none, they also sought to dissuade him from becoming an actor.

This, of course, only led Keach to pursue acting with ardor. He acted at Van Nuys High School and then at the University of California, Berkeley, graduating in 1963 with degrees in English and dramatic arts.

Proceeding to the Yale School of Drama, Keach, in the winter of 1964, wrote a letter, cold, to Joseph Papp, impresario of the New York Shakespeare Festival, enclosing his resume, a sheaf of good reviews from two summers at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and recommendations from a few directors.

Papp not only invited Keach for an interview, after a brief audition he offered him a job: Marcellus in “Hamlet” in the park for the upcoming summer. Keach accepted the part, played it, then infuriated Papp by announcing that he was going to London on a Fulbright scholarship to study at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts.

Immersing himself in all things Shakespeare during his year in London, while grabbing every opportunity to observe his idol, Laurence Olivier, onstage (and even briefly meet him), Keach returned to the United States in 1965 and almost immediately became an in-demand stage actor.

He was invited to join the repertory company being put together for Lincoln Center’s new Vivian Beaumont Theater. A rocky first season ensued for the company, but Keach emerged from it unscathed with an offer to play the lead in a highly satirical new work written by a Berkeley-schooled playwright named Barbara Garson. The play loosely crossed the darkening narrative of the then-president of the United States, Lyndon B. Johnson, with Shakespeare’s Macbeth. It was called “MacBird!”

“MacBird!” invited controversy, especially with its sardonic inference, just three years after the Kennedy assassination, that Johnson himself had been behind Kennedy’s death. No major New York theater would touch the show.

It finally opened at the Village Gate on Feb. 22, 1967, and ran there as an off-Broadway hit for 386 performances, garnering for Keach an Obie Award and the Drama Desk’s Vernon Rice Award.

Keach’s first film work soon followed (under the name Stacy Keach Jr.) in “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” in 1968. His proclivity for gaining and losing important movie roles also kicked in at this time as Mike Nichols cast and then uncast him in his film version of “Catch-22.” To take the part, Keach had passed up Robert Altman’s offer of the role of Hawkeye Pierce in the movie “M-A-S-H.”

Keach made his Broadway debut in 1969 playing Buffalo Bill in “Indians,” Arthur Kopit’s scathing deconstruction of America’s Wild West legend. The role brought Keach a Tony nomination for Best Actor in a Play and won him a Drama Desk Award.

In 1972, he returned to the New York Shakespeare Festival and the Delacorte Theater in Central Park to assay Hamlet, leading a cast that included James Earl Jones, Colleen Dewhurst, Barnard Hughes, Sam Waterston, Raul Julia and Charles Durning.

The reviews were extraordinary, with Clive Barnes calling Keach “one of the great Hamlets of our time” and “the finest American classical actor since John Barrymore.” This theatrical acclaim led to film work for Keach, with parts in a host of movies throughout the 1970s, including “The New Centurions” and “Fat City,” as well as “The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean” in 1972, “The Killer Inside Me” in 1976 and the two Cheech and Chong movies in 1978 and 1981.

Still, true breakthrough success eluded Keach in Hollywood. With the window closing on his opportunity for major movie stardom in the late 1970s, Keach opted to, in his own words, just “get out there and hustle,” increasingly taking any film job that amused him, while also beginning to look beyond the big screen to television.

The golden age of the television miniseries ignited by “Roots” in 1977 swept up Keach, with parts in “Jesus of Nazareth” (as Barabas), directed by Franco Zeffirelli (1977); “A Rumor of War” (1980); and a lead in the Civil War potboiler “The Blue & the Gray” (1982).

This led to his being cast as Spillane’s Mike Hammer for a new CBS television series that debuted in January 1984. The show would run successfully for three seasons, stamping Keach with the imprimatur of Hammer’s signature trench coat and fedora.

This ascent, however, was interrupted by Keach’s arrest at Heathrow Airport in London on April 4, 1984, on charges of cocaine possession. Keach pleaded guilty and, to his surprise, was sentenced to nine months in Reading Prison.

His Mike Hammer show producers were able to keep him on the air with an assist from impersonator Rich Little, who, in Keach’s absence, mimicked his narrative voice-overs for episodes that had already been shot. A chastened Keach was released after six months, resuming his work on the series and ultimately kicking his cocaine habit.

After the show’s cancellation on network television in 1987, Keach reprised the role of Hammer in 1997 for a syndicated series that lasted one season.

The breadth of his activity on television, in film and on the stage was expansive — from portraying Ernest Hemingway in a 1988 made-for-TV movie (and winning a Golden Globe Award), to starring in the national tour of the Cy Coleman musical “Barnum” (1981), to a memorable regular role as Ken Titus, alcoholic father of the title character in the Fox sitcom “Titus” (2000-2002).

He also played young George W. Bush’s spiritual guide in Oliver Stone’s 2008 film “W.,” and supporting roles in movies including “The Bourne Legacy” (2012) and Alexander Payne’s “Nebraska” (2013).

Keach lent his voice to “Simpsons” episodes as Duff Brewery’s president, Howard K. Duff VIII, and guest starred on TV sitcoms and dramas, including “Will & Grace,” “ER” and “30 Rock.”

He took on Richard III at the Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington in 1990 and King Lear at the Goodman Theater in Chicago in 2006. He received a Tony nomination in Jon Robin Baitz’s “Other Desert Cities” in 2012.

In May 2017, Keach suffered a heart attack onstage as Ernest Hemingway on opening night at the Goodman Theater in the one-man play “Pamplona.” He returned after bypass surgery to complete the run a year later.

Keach was married four times, and for a brief but star-crossed handful of years, beginning in 1969, was involved in a relationship with Judy Collins, traveling with her to Woodstock and even singing backup on her recording of “Amazing Grace.”

His first three marriages, to Kathryn Baker, Marilyn Aiken and Jill Donahue, ended in divorce.

He married Polish-born actress Malgosia Tomassi in 1986, and she survives him, along with their son, Shannon, and daughter, Karolina Keach. He is also survived by a brother, James, an actor, television director and occasional collaborator on film projects such as the 1980 western “The Long Riders,” in which the Keach brothers played the outlaw James brothers and also served as their own co-producers.

“Big stars get to be choosy,” Keach observed in his 2013 memoir. “Paul Newman amassed 82 credits in his filmography, Dustin Hoffman has 73, and Al Pacino just 50. I’m at 187 and counting.

“Sure, some of these projects were frustrating to work on, or fell apart in the editing room, or otherwise just flopped at the box office. In most cases I enjoyed the role I was playing, and I learned something about myself in the process. All these years later, I’m able to look back at a treasure trove of memories I might otherwise have forfeited for the distant hope of a shot at movie stardom.”

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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