Stacy Keach, Star Of Stage And Mike Hammer Series, Dies At 85

NEW YORK, NY - JUNE 7: Stacy Keach is photographed June 7, 1985 at Kennedy Airport in New York City following his return to the United States after serving six months in a British prison for cocaine smuggling.Keach was arrested at Heathrow Airport for carrying the drugs, pled guilty, and served six months at Reading Prison.

(Photo by Yvonne Hemsey/Getty Images)Yvonne Hemsey via Getty ImagesStacy Keach, one of America’s finest stage actors who became best known for playing scruffy private eye Mike Hammer on TV and whose career was nearly derailed after he was imprisoned in 1984 for trying to smuggle cocaine into Britain, died Tuesday.He was 85.Keach died at home in Magdalenka, Poland, “after a long and difficult battle with a serious heart condition and heart failure,” his wife, Malgosia Tomassi Keach, said in a statement.

Keach had previously suffered a heart attack onstage in Chicago in June 2017.Advertisement Though he was considered a preeminent interpreter of Shakespeare and a favorite of such legendary directors as John Huston, Keach was indelibly linked with his take on the hard-boiled Hammer, the fictitious TV private detective created by crime novelist Mickey Spillane.Unwilling to do the same thing over and over, Keach left behind a crazy quilt of roles, playing a stoner cop on film, King Lear onstage and also narrating “World’s Most Amazing Videos” on TV.He played a deranged colonel in “The Ninth Configuration” (also known as “Twinkle, Twinkle Killer Kane”), led the TV show “Titus,” had a role in Alexander Payne’s Oscar-nominated drama “Nebraska,” and played a New York archbishop in a recurring role on the CBS police drama “Blue Bloods.” Last year, he had an excellent turn as George Clooney’s bitter father in “Jay Kelly.”“My objective was to have as varied a selection of roles as possible.

It probably did hurt my career,” he told New York magazine in 2012.“My choices have had a cost attached to it...