Mike Hammer star and stage actor Stacy Keach dead at 85

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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…

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, died Tuesday. He was 85.

Keach died at home in Magdalenka, Poland, "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 June 2017.

Though he was considered a preeminent 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 on film, 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, had a role in Alexander Payne's Oscar-nominated drama Nebraska and played a New York archbishop in a recurring role on the CBS police drama Blue Bloods. Last year, he had an excellent turn as George Clooney's bitter father in Jay Kelly.

"My objective was to have as varied a selection of roles as possible. It probably did hurt my career," he told New York magazine in 2012. "My choices have had a cost attached to it. But I've gotten to play Hamlet, and Richard III, and King Lear, and I would not give that up for anything."

Actor Lou Diamond Phillips, who played Keach's son in the 2008 TV movie Lone Rider, said in a post on X that Keach was a "consummate actor, gracious, giving and incredibly kind even while he had the presence of a smoldering volcano. One of the greats. Proud to have shared some frames with him."

Keach, seen in April 1984, was one of America's finest stage actors.

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