The American actor Stacy Keach has died at the age of 85 from heart failure, a performer whose extraordinarily long career encompassed a wide array of roles that endeared him to audiences across multiple generations. The news was confirmed by his wife, his fourth, Malgosia Tomassi, with whom Keach had moved to Poland and who had even encouraged his conversion to Catholicism.
Born in Savannah, Georgia, on June 2, 1941, Keach was the son of an actor, as was his younger brother James. He began acting on stage, performing on Broadway and Off-Broadway, and theatre has remained a constant part of his life and career: to name just one work beyond the many Shakespearean classics, Keach played Richard Nixon in Peter Morgan’s Frost/Nixon, which later became a Ron Howard film.
In cinema, Keach arrived at the end of the 1960s, and soon he landed his first leading roles: in the western Doc, in Richard Fleischer’s The New Centurions, and especially in Fat City, John Huston’s boxing drama in which Keach embodies the splendid loser Billy Tully.
He was also set to portray Father Karras in The Exorcist, appeared for Sergio Martino in The Mountain of the Cannibal God, and was the Frank James of Walter Hill’s handsome western The Long Riders. He also appeared in films such as Escape from Los Angeles, American History X, Machete, and Nebraska, while his last film role was in Jay Kelly, playing the playboy father of the film’s protagonist, portrayed by George Clooney.
Yet it was the small screen that delivered the roles most responsible for Keach’s fame, particularly when, in the early 1980s, he was cast as the hard-boiled detective Mike Hammer, the character created by Mickey Spillane, in TV series produced during that decade and which would return to production at the end of the following decade. Younger viewers, meanwhile, will remember Keach’s face as Henry Pope, the warden of Fox River Penitentiary in the series Prison Break.
For that part, Keach said he drew inspiration from someone he knew during a legal misadventure: in 1984 he was arrested at London’s airport for cocaine possession and sentenced to several months in prison. It was to the warden of Reading Prison, where he served his sentence, that Keach said he based his Pope portrayal.
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