"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."
Stacy Keach, the American actor best known for playing Mickey Spillane's private detective Mike Hammer on television, has died aged 85, according to The Guardian. His career moved between Broadway, Hollywood and television across more than five decades, and his final screen role was as George Clooney's bitter father in Jay Kelly.
The obituary records a career of deliberate breadth. Keach worked twice for director John Huston, in Fat City and The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, and appeared in American History X and The Bourne Legacy. He played a tough trucker in the Australian thriller Roadgames, was electrocuted in Children of the Corn and had a robot remove his heart in Class of 1999. His biggest break came with Hammer, whom he played, in the report's phrase, as a modern-day knight and champion of the underdog.
Keach was candid that this range carried a cost. "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."
Born in Savannah, Georgia, to actor parents who met at Northwestern University, Keach took degrees in English and dramatic art at the University of California, Berkeley, attended the Yale School of Drama and studied at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art as a Fulbright scholar. He earned a Tony nomination as Buffalo Bill in the Broadway play Indians and played Edmund opposite Lee J. Cobb in King Lear. He later headed the national touring cast of Frost/Nixon and, in 2017, collapsed onstage in Chicago during Pamplona, a one-man show about Hemingway, leading to the run's cancellation.
The obituary gives substantial space to his arrest in 1984 at Heathrow Airport, while he was still making the Hammer series, for trying to smuggle 1.3 ounces of cocaine concealed in an aerosol shaving cream can and elsewhere in his luggage. He was sentenced to nine months and released after six, having been sent to Reading Prison because authorities judged a minimum-security jail too accessible to reporters. He wrote in his 2013 memoir that prison was "very lonely, very depressing, very sad", and that he spent much of it re-evaluating "my own stupidity". Afterwards he narrated a documentary on drug use at work and testified before a House panel, telling members: "There is no greater imprisonment than that of being dependent on a chemical substance for one's existence." He later played a prison warden in Prison Break, modelling the character on his own warden in England.
Keach was married four times and is survived by his wife Tomassi, whom he met when she appeared in the Hammer series, and his children, Shannon and Karolina. The report does not give a cause of death or say where he died, and those details are not yet confirmed.
