Stacy Keach, television’s Mike Hammer, dies at 85

Stacy Keach, the actor known for playing television’s private detective Mike Hammer and the aging boxer in Fat City, has died at 85 at his family home in Magdalenka, Poland, his wife, Małgosia Tomassi Keach, announced.

His wife said he died after a long and difficult battle with a serious heart condition and heart failure. The Hollywood Reporter gives Tuesday as the day of his death, while Deadline gives Monday; the exact day remains unresolved.

From the stage to Mike Hammer

Before becoming a familiar television detective, Keach built a stage career that included Shakespeare. He received a Tony nomination in 1970 for playing Buffalo Bill in Indians. In John Huston’s Fat City (1972), he played Billy Tully, an aging boxer who mentors a younger fighter.

In the early 1970s, New York Times critic Clive Barnes called Keach “one of the great Hamlets of our time.” In 1989, he won a Golden Globe and received an Emmy nomination for portraying Hemingway in a miniseries. He was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame in 2015.

Keach first played Mickey Spillane’s private detective Mike Hammer in the 1983 television film Murder Me, Murder You. He returned to the character in subsequent series and television films.

Filming was interrupted after his cocaine arrest at London’s Heathrow Airport in April 1984. He pleaded guilty, received a nine-month prison sentence and served six months before returning to the role in The New Mike Hammer.

Keach told Vulture in 2012 that he had feared his career was over and felt grateful when CBS took him back. He said the experience later shaped his performance as a warden in Prison Break: he modeled the character on the compassionate warden he had known in England.