A Farewell to Stacy Keach
Some actors become famous for a single defining role. Others leave behind a career so varied that trying to pin them down to one performance seems almost impossible. Stacy Keach was most definitely the latter.
Keach passed away at his home in Magdalenka, Poland, on Tuesday, following what his wife, Malgosia Tomassi Keach, described as “a long and difficult battle with a serious heart condition and heart failure.” Keach had previously suffered a heart attack on stage in Chicago in 2017, but continued to work and entertain audiences in the years that followed.
Whether he was bringing hard-boiled authority to Mike Hammer, commanding the screen in The Ninth Configuration, playing a tough-as-nails trucker in Roadgames, or lending his considerable presence to the gloriously bonkers world of Class of 1999, Keach was an actor you could always rely on to make an impression.
My own appreciation of him stretches across decades and a diverse collection of films. I remember him in The New Centurions, the 1976 Dynasty alongside Harrison Ford and Gerrit Graham, The Sicilian Cross and The Squeeze as well as the wonderfully bizarre Slave of the Cannibal God. He was equally at home in the John Carpenter’s dystopian madness of Escape from L.A., the deliciously macabre The Morgue segment of John Carpenter’s Body Bags, and the criminally underrated Sunset Grill. Then there was Raw Justice, and his memorable appearances in American History X and Nebraska.
Of course, for many of us, Keach will forever be Mike Hammer. His long-running association with Mickey Spillane’s hard-boiled detective gave television one of its most recognisable private eyes, and he brought just the right combination of toughness, world-weariness and old-fashioned screen presence to the part. My father-in-law was a huge fan of Spillane and we connected over Keach’s perfect performance.
But what I always appreciated was his willingness to embrace the sillier side of cinema. From the Cheech & Chong comedies to sharing the screen with Bruce Campbell in Icebreaker and The Man with the Screaming Brain, Keach never seemed particularly precious about his image. He could go from Shakespeare to slapstick, from literary heavyweight to B-movie lunatic, and somehow make it all work.
And then there was Hemingway. Back in the late eighties, Keach introduced me to Ernest Hemingway through the television miniseries Hemingway. I tuned in because Stacy Keach was the star in the early 90’s. I came away having discovered a writer whose work might otherwise have passed me by. That’s perhaps one of the loveliest things an actor can do: introduce you to something that stays with you long after the credits have rolled.
Stacy Keach was never simply a leading man or a character actor. He was one of those wonderfully dependable performers whose presence could elevate an otherwise unremarkable film, and whose willingness to take on just about anything made his filmography such a pleasure to explore. He leaves behind a remarkable body of work, spanning the stage, television and cinema, and an army of performances that will continue to surprise, entertain and occasionally make you wonder just what on earth he was thinking.
For me, he’ll always be the actor who could play a Shakespearean king on a Sunday, Mike Hammer on weeknights, and a gloriously ridiculous madman alongside Bruce Campbell on the weekend.
And I’d have happily watched him do all three.
Rest in peace, Stacy.
