Stacy Keach, actor known for playing detective Mike Hammer, dies at 85

Actor Stacy Keach, best known for his title role in the 1980s television series “Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer,” has died. He was 85.

Keach died at home Tuesday in Magdalenka, Poland, after a long battle with a heart condition and heart failure, his wife, Malgosia Tomassi Keach, told the Hollywood Reporter 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. His passing leaves an immeasurable emptiness in our lives. But his extraordinary spirit, his unforgettable voice and the love he gave so generously will remain with us forever,” Malgosia Tomassi Keach wrote.

His colleagues remembered him as a warm, approachable and collaborative friend who liked a challenge.

“He brought such power and dignity and humanity to everything he did,” Susan Albert Loewenberg, founder and producing director of L.A. Theatre Works, told The Times. “I’m just forever grateful that he shared his talent with us all over all those years.”

Stacy Keach was born on June 2, 1941, in Savannah, Ga., and soon moved to Los Angeles, where his father, Walter Stacy Keach Sr., joined the Pasadena Playhouse as an actor and director. Inspired by his father’s work, Keach started acting as a teen at Van Nuys High School and UC Berkeley, where he studied English and dramatic arts.

He attended the Yale School of Drama in 1966 and was a Fulbright scholar to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.

Throughout his career, Keach balanced his work in television and movies while continuing classical and Broadway stage performances, with Shakespearean roles including Hamlet, Henry V, Coriolanus, Falstaff, Macbeth, Richard III and King Lear.

In 2015, he was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame.

In the 1980s, he became a founding member of L.A. Theatre Works. Loewenberg said Keach appeared nearly 20 productions with the company over the years. Many were leading roles in famous works of theater, including John Proctor in “The Crucible,” Willy Loman in “Death of a Salesman” and The Creature in “Frankenstein.”

“Playing these roles is no joke,” Loewenberg said. “It is a very all-consuming job when you’re doing it, and he rose to the occasion every time. He never disappointed us.”

The Times wrote in 2003 that he would appear in the group’s radio plays whenever he felt a need to flex his acting muscles.

“You get to sort of dip your foot in the water of great theatrical art. You get to wade in the pool. Most working actors in Los Angeles have other lives. They have a series or are doing a movie and they don’t have the time to devote [to a traditional theatrical production],” he said at the time.

Keach played Ken Titus on the sitcom “Titus,” Warden Henry Pope in “Prison Break” and served as the long-running narrator of CNBC’s crime documentary series “American Greed.” He also starred in the 1972 boxing drama “Fat City,” “The Long Riders,” “American History X” and “The Bourne Legacy.” His performance as writer Ernest Hemingway in the TV movie “Hemingway” in 1988 earned him a Golden Globe.

But his most well-known role was the tough guy private eye Mike Hammer in “Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer,” also known as “The New Mike Hammer,” which debuted in 1984 and ran for three seasons. Keach reprised the role for a syndicated series that lasted one season in 1997.

In 1984, Keach was arrested in Heathrow Airport in London on charges of cocaine possession. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to nine months in prison. He told the judge at the time that he had been addicted to cocaine for about a year, using the drug “as a means of trying to alleviate exhaustion.”

Keach wrote about his struggles with cocaine in his autobiography, “All in All: An Actor’s Life On and Off the Stage.”