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Stacy Keach, the stage-trained actor who became a household name as hard-boiled TV detective Mike Hammer and later played the sympathetic Warden Henry Pope on Prison Break, has died. He was 85. According to a statement from his wife, Polish actress Malgosia Tomassi Keach, he died on Tuesday, November 10, at the family’s home in Magdalenka, Poland, as reported by CBS News, Rolling Stone and other major outlets.
How did Stacy Keach die?
His wife said Keach died “after a long and difficult battle with a serious heart condition and heart failure,” per CBS News. HuffPost, citing the Associated Press, notes the actor had previously suffered a heart attack while performing on stage in Chicago in 2017. Keach is survived by Malgosia, his wife of roughly four decades, their children Karolina and Shannon, and grandchildren, according to NTD. Funeral or memorial plans have not been announced.
Who was Stacy Keach? From Broadway to Mike Hammer
Born Walter Stacy Keach Jr. on June 2, 1941, in Savannah, Georgia, he was the son of character actor and director Stacy Keach Sr. and the older brother of actor-director James Keach. Before Hollywood, he built a reputation as one of America’s leading Shakespearean actors, playing Hamlet multiple times, and earned a Tony nomination for playing Buffalo Bill in the 1969 Broadway production Indians.
The role that defined him came in the 1980s. Keach starred as Mickey Spillane’s fedora-wearing New York private eye in CBS’s Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer (later retitled The New Mike Hammer), which ran from 1984 to 1987. He returned to the character in the 1989 TV movie Mike Hammer: Murder Takes All and the syndicated Mike Hammer, Private Eye in 1997-98, Rolling Stone recalls.
Stacy Keach movies and TV shows to remember
Keach logged more than 200 film and TV credits across six decades, TMZ reports. Highlights include John Huston’s boxing drama Fat City (1972), Doc opposite Faye Dunaway, the bumbling narcotics cop Sgt. Stedenko in Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke, outlaw Frank James in The Long Riders, American History X, Alexander Payne’s Nebraska, the gruff dad on the sitcom Titus, and Warden Pope on Prison Break from 2005 to 2007. A generation of viewers also knew his gravelly voice as the narrator of CNBC’s American Greed. For more Hollywood history on the big screen right now, see our guide to The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth.
Stacy Keach’s 1984 arrest and comeback
His career nearly stalled in 1984, when he was arrested in Britain for trying to bring cocaine into the country. CBS News reports he was sentenced to nine months and served six, working as the prison librarian. In his 2013 memoir All in All, he called the sentencing the lowest point of his life, according to the AP account carried by HuffPost. Afterward he spoke about addiction at colleges and rehab centers, and CBS put the shelved Mike Hammer series back on its schedule, giving him one of TV’s more notable second acts.
What happens next
Tributes from colleagues are expected to continue through the week, and many streaming services carry his films and Prison Break for anyone wanting to revisit his work. It’s another loss for classic TV this month, as the industry also reckons with the fate of landmark sites like the historic Radford Studio lot.
This is a developing story.
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- Netflix Poised to Buy Historic Radford Studio Lot at Foreclosure Auction
Sources: CBS News, Rolling Stone, HuffPost/AP, TMZ, NTD