Actor Stacy Keach, celebrated for Shakespeare and tough-guy roles, dies at 85

Stacy Keach, 85, died after a long career that spanned television, film and theatre. He was best known to TV audiences for his hard-boiled detective in the series Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer and for a Golden Globe-winning turn as Ernest Hemingway in a television miniseries. In film, he appeared as a boxer in John Huston’s Fat City and later worked with Huston again in The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean.

A Yale-trained Fulbright scholar and graduate of the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, Keach was praised early on as America’s finest classical actor since John Barrymore. He performed Shakespeare at the Central Park open-air theatre, playing Falstaff, Coriolanus and Hamlet, and later earned acclaim for an award-winning Lear in Chicago in 2006, which The Washington Post described as “a force of nature.”

Keach balanced his classical work with numerous screen roles, debuting in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and appearing in Robert Altman’s Brewster McCloud and The Traveling Executioner. He continued to return to the stage throughout his career, reprising Falstaff in 2014 and taking on other major roles.

His personal life included four marriages; he was survived by his fourth wife, Malgosia Tomassi, and their adopted children, Shannon and Karolina. Keach’s only major legal setback was a 1984 conviction for cocaine smuggling, after which he served six months in prison, converted to Catholicism and later supported anti-drug campaigns.

“I thought my career was over but that really saved me,” Keach said of his post-prison work with Nancy Reagan’s Just Say No campaign.

He suffered a heart attack while performing Hemingway in Chicago in 2017 but continued acting, with his final screen role as George Clooney’s father in the 2025 film Jay Kelly.