Stacy Keach, Who Played Badasses With the Best of Them, Dies at 85

Stacy Keach, the two-fisted actor who starred as the hard-boiled private eye Mike Hammer on television and won acclaim — but never superstardom — for his work in Fat City, The New Centurions and many other films, died Wednesday. He was 85

Keach died at his family in Magdalenka, Poland., his wife announced.

Keach also was regarded as perhaps the best American Shakespearean actor of his era; in the early 1970s, the influential New York Times critic Clive Barnes called him “one of the great Hamlets of our time” and “the finest American classic actor since John Barrymore.”

Survivors include his younger brother, James Keach, an actor and the director of Walk the Line. They portrayed the outlaw brothers Frank and Jesse James in The Long Riders (1980) and co-wrote and co-produced the film as well. (For a PBS series in 1971, they had starred as Orville and Wilbur Wright.)

Their father was the veteran character actor Stacy Keach Sr. Get Smart fans know him as Carlson, the head of the lab at CONTROL, and he appeared as Clarence Birdseye in a series of TV commercials.

Keach and producer Jay Bernstein resurrected Mickey Spillane’s legendary private dick for the 1983 CBS telefilm Murder Me, Murder You, and that led to The New Mike Hammer, a series that ran for four seasons, several other TV movies and another 1997-98 show, Mike Hammer, Private Eye.

In his 2013 memoir, All in All: An Actor’s Life On and Off the Stage, Keach wrote that when he was a youngster, his mother told him to quit reading Spillane’s paperbacks, which she called “trash.”

But Keach “was always seduced back into Mike Hammer’s world of stone cold violence and hot and heavy sex,” he wrote. “My parents thought Mickey Spillane was cranking out soft-core pornography … I fantasized about being part of the world Mickey Spillane had created. It only took me 30 years to finally get that chance.”

Keach became pals with Spillane, and the author insisted that Keach always don the character’s iconic fedora when playing Hammer.

In the gritty Fat City (1972), Keach turned in a powerful performance as the over-the-hill boxer Billy Tully, who mentors a greenhorn prizefighter (Jeff Bridges) in the downtrodden town of Stockton, California. World light heavyweight champion Jose Torres gave the actor a few tips, but Keach was knocked cold during one scene, footage of which director John Huston used in the film.

Keach returned to the squared circle to play the old-school Pops Leary, who trains his son (Holt McCallany), in the lamentably short-lived 2011 FX boxing drama Lights Out.

The year 1972 also saw Keach collaborate again with Huston in The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean and portray an obsessed rookie cop under the guidance of a world-weary LAPD veteran (George C. Scott) in The New Centurions, the adaptation of the Joseph Wambaugh novel.

Keach said a voting technicality cost him an Oscar nomination, and he was bitterly disappointed.

He had made his big-screen debut playing a drifter in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1968), and his other notable films included Robert Altman‘s Brewster McCloud (1970); the X-rated End of the Road (1970); Doc (1971), in which he was Doc Holliday; That Championship Season (1982), portraying one of the ex-jocks; Mistral’s Daughter (1984), as an eccentric painter; and Nebraska (2013), as a small-town bully.

Some of his efforts were not as notable, like Butterfly (1982), in which he had an incest scene with Pia Zadora.

On the comedy side, Keach was much-loved as Sgt. Stedenko, a narc who ends up becoming a stoner and gets turned into a lizard, in the Cheech & Chong films Up in Smoke (1978) and Nice Dreams (1981), and he explored the darker side of funny as Ken, the alcoholic, womanizing father, on three seasons of the Fox sitcom Titus.

Keach got into some serious trouble on April 4, 1984, when he was arrested at Heathrow Airport in London for carrying 1.3 ounces of cocaine that he had tried to conceal in a fake can of shaving cream. He served six months in England’s Reading Jail before being released for good behavior.

“I thought my career was over, I really did,” he told Vulture in 2012. “When CBS took me back [to continue as Mike Hammer,] I was really grateful. I went to Washington to testify about my problem. Nancy Reagan even took me under her wing.

“I’ve drawn from the experience since then. In [the Fox series] Prison Break, I tried to model the warden I played [Henry Pope] after the warden I had in England who had great compassion and wanted to help inmates rehabilitate themselves rather than punish them.”

In June 2017, the audience gathered to see Keach star as Ernest Hemingway on opening night in the one-man play Pamplona at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago saw the actor struggle mightily to remember his lines.

“It was as if he became trapped in certain sections of the play and was unable to extricate himself and move onward. For much of the night, Keach’s eyes appeared closed,” the Chicago Tribune reported. The performance was canceled, as were all remaining dates.

It turned out that Keach had suffered a mild heart attack. Days later, he vowed to return to Chicago to perform in 2018, and he did. “I have an unfulfilled obligation to the play, to the city and to myself,” he said.

Walter Stacy Keach Jr. was born on June 2, 1941, in Savannah, Georgia, where his father taught drama at Armstrong Junior College. The family moved to Pasadena, and Keach graduated from Van Nuys High School in 1959. (His dad had signed as a contract player with Universal.)

Keach studied theater at the University of California, Berkeley and between semesters worked with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. He then won a scholarship to the Yale School of Drama and then a Fulbright Scholarship, which brought him to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.

Later, Keach attracted attention in the titular role in MacBird, a political satire that parodied Shakespeare. The “political cabaret” opened in Greenwich Village in 1967, and the actor received an Obie Award for playing a combination of Lyndon B. Johnson and Macbeth.

Keach then starred off-Broadway in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, played Hamlet for Joseph Papp in Central Park, portrayed Edmund in King Lear on Broadway and recorded the Bard’s words for a line of recordings. He then was superb as the melancholy prince in a 1972-73 off-Broadway production of Hamlet.

Keach also received a Tony nomination in 1970 for playing Buffalo Bill in Indians and starred in 1993 in Robert Schenkkan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning epic The Kentucky Cycle. In Solitary Confinement, he was the guy who played six roles, “all unbeknownst to the audience until the end of the play,” one reviewer wrote, and he starred as Richard Nixon in a national touring production of Frost/Nixon.

In 1989, he won a Golden Globe and received an Emmy nomination for portraying Ernest Hemingway in a syndicated miniseries.

In the foreword of Keach’s book, Alec Baldwin said that the actor’s “passion and persistence have combined with powerful gifts and technique to make him one of the “true wild mustangs of theater history.”

Keach also appeared in films including The Traveling Executioner (1970), The Killer Inside Me (1976), The Ninth Configuration (1980), Road Games (1981), Escape From L.A. (1996), as a really, really bad guy in American History X (1998), Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (2013), The Bourne Legacy (2012), Gold (2016) and Jay Kelly (2025).

He provided the voice of Skipper (a good guy for a change) in the two Planes films, narrated the CNBC financial crime series American Greed and played Matt LeBlanc’s dad on Man With a Plan.

Keach was hired to play the young priest in The Exorcist (1973), but director William Friedkin changed his mind and gave the part to Jason Miller, who received an Oscar nomination for his performance.

“My career as a movie star shuddered to a stop, just as it was getting started,” he wrote in his book.

Keach was married four times, most recently to Polish-born actress and model Malgosia Tomassi, whom he wed in 1986 after she had visited him frequently in jail. Earlier, he was romantically involved for four years with singer Judy Collins (his brother was married to Collins’ sister).

Duane Byrge contributed to this report.