Stacy Keach, the stage actor who became best known as private eye Mike Hammer on television, has died aged 85.
Keach died at home in Magdalenka, Poland, on Tuesday after a long battle with a serious heart condition and heart failure, his wife, Malgosia Tomassi Keach, said in a statement. The Associated Press reported the death.
Keach built his name first on stage, where he played Hamlet in two separate productions and earned a Tony nomination for Arthur Kopit’s Indians in 1969. He won a Golden Globe for playing Ernest Hemingway in the 1988 miniseries Hemingway.
On screen he played a washed-up boxer in John Huston’s Fat City in 1972, then took the title role in CBS’s Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer from 1984 to 1987, a part that brought him a Golden Globe nomination. Later audiences knew his voice as the narrator of CNBC’s American Greed.
His career nearly stalled in 1984, when he served six months in a British prison after pleading guilty to trying to smuggle cocaine into Britain. He suffered a heart attack on stage in Chicago in 2017 and had bypass surgery the next day.
Source: The Guardian
