Stacy Keach: Actor known for playing detective Mike Hammer dies aged 85

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Actor Stacy Keach, who portrayed rugged characters such as fictional detective Mike Hammer and American novelist Ernest Hemingway, died on ‌Tuesday aged 85. Keach died in Poland…

Actor Stacy Keach, who portrayed rugged characters such as fictional detective Mike Hammer and American novelist Ernest Hemingway, died on ‌Tuesday aged 85.

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.

“Stacy was 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,” Tomassi said.

Keach stood out in dozens ​of starring and character actor parts on television and in films in roles as diverse as Barabbas (the TV miniseries Jesus of Nazareth) and Richard Nixon (the play Frost/Nixon). He also had a busy stage career, often starring in Shakespearean works such as King Lear and Hamlet. His performance as the latter in 1972 inspired a New York Times critic to label Keach “the finest American classic actor since John Barrymore”.

Keach’s most prominent role was Mike Hammer, the hard-boiled detective, ​clad in fedora and trench coat, in television adaptations of the works of suspense writer Mickey Spillane. The New Mike Hammer ran from the mid to late 1980s and Keach revived the character in the Mike Hammer, Private Eye series from 1997-1998. ⁠He also played Hammer in four made-for-television movies and narrated 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.

The first Hammer series was interrupted when Keach went to prison for six months in England in 1985 after more than 30 grammes of ⁠cocaine were found in his possessions at London’s Heathrow airport. In his ​book he said he had been addicted and in 2013 Keach told Fox News that ​getting caught “saved my life, actually”.

Keach had a history with Hemingway, the complex Nobel Prize-winning author and adventurer. His portrayal of the writer in Hemingway in the 1988 television miniseries earned him a Golden…

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