Stacy Keach, TV’s Mike Hammer and Star of ‘Fat City,’ Dies at 85

Stacy Keach, the actor who played private investigator Mike Hammer on television and the aging boxer Billy Tully in the 1972 film “Fat City,” died Tuesday at his family home in Magdalenka, Poland. He was 85.

His wife, Malgosia Keach, said in a statement shared by the actor’s representative with USA Today that Keach died “after a long and difficult battle with a serious heart condition and heart failure.” She called him a legendary actor admired by audiences around the world, and “my beloved husband, my companion and the heart of our family.”

Keach was born June 2, 1941, in Savannah, Georgia, and grew up in Southern California. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree at the Yale School of Drama. His father was the actor Stacy Keach Sr., and he acted on screen with his younger brother James Keach, including in the 1980 western “The Long Riders.”

Mike Hammer and ‘Fat City’

Keach first played Hammer, the hard-boiled detective from Mickey Spillane’s novels, in the 1983 television movie “Murder Me, Murder You.” He went on to play the character in the CBS series “Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer” from 1984 to 1987, in later television movies and in the series “Mike Hammer, Private Eye” in 1997 and 1998. He earned a Golden Globe nomination in 1985 for the role.

Before Hammer, Keach had already made his mark in film. In John Huston’s “Fat City” (1972), he played Tully, a boxer past his prime hoping for one more run, opposite Jeff Bridges as a younger fighter on the rise. He worked with Huston again in “The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean.”

His other film and television work included Sgt. Stedenko in the Cheech & Chong films “Up in Smoke” and “Nice Dreams,” the sitcom “Titus,” in which he played the antagonistic patriarch Ken, and roles in “American History X,” “The Bourne Legacy,” “Nebraska” and “Blue Bloods.”

A stage career and a health scare

Keach started his career on the stage and was regarded as one of the leading American interpreters of Shakespeare, performing in productions of “King Lear,” “Hamlet,” “Henry V” and “Coriolanus.” He received a Tony nomination in 1970 for playing Buffalo Bill in the Broadway production of “Indians,” and he was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 2015.

His career was interrupted in 1984, when he was arrested at London’s Heathrow Airport for trying to bring 1.3 ounces of cocaine into Britain. He served time in prison in England, and the “Mike Hammer” series, which had been shelved after his arrest, returned to CBS for the 1986-87 season.

Nearly a decade ago, Keach had a heart attack on stage in Chicago in June 2017, during opening night of “Pamplona,” a play in which he played Ernest Hemingway. He wrote in a 2018 New York Times essay that he repeated the same line a half dozen times before it became clear something was wrong. Doctors found clogged arteries, and he underwent a six-hour triple bypass operation the next day.

Keach is survived by his wife, Malgosia Keach, their children Karolina and Shannon Keach, and their grandchildren.

Reporting based on coverage by USA Today, Reuters, Variety and the Associated Press.