Stacy Keach had range.
He played outlaw Frank James in the Western The Long Riders, the bumbling Sgt. Stedenko in the Cheech and Chong stoner comedy Up in Smoke, and Hamlet on stage multiple times. He narrated numerous documentaries for National Geographic and PBS.
Keach died on Tuesday at his family's home in Poland "after a long and difficult battle with a serious heart condition and heart failure," his wife Malgosia Keach shared in a statement through a representative. He was 85.
Keach seemed to be anything you wanted him to be: Born in Savannah, Ga., in 1941, he grew up in Southern California. He was classically trained at the Yale School of Drama and studied on a Fulbright scholarship at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, but he was best known for playing, well, badasses: cops, cowboys, detectives — the strong, but not silent type.
In the 1980s and '90s, his fedora and signature mustache (which covered a scar from cleft palate operations as a child) served him well in his role as Mike Hammer, private eye — a character created by crime novelist Mickey Spillane.
He had a steady career except in 1984, when he was arrested at Heathrow Airport for bringing cocaine into Britain on a flight. He served six months in prison, which, he said, gave his subsequent roles more depth.
"Anybody who has an experience like that certainly carries it with them," he told NPR's Scott Simon in 1986. "And from an artistic point of view, utilizes it — or hopefully utilizes it — in a way that's going to be positive and productive. I think that the most important thing from my point of view was not taking freedom for granted."
Keach got back to work and kept acting as he got older. He did network sitcoms — playing the father of a helicopter traffic reporter along for the ride in NBC's Crowded as well as prestige films, such as Alexander Payne's Nebraska in 2013.
His first love, though, was the stage, especially Shakespeare, and anyone who saw him on stage remembered it. He said his toughest role was Macbeth: "Of all the major tragic roles in the canon, it's probably the most difficult," he told NPR's Robert Siegel in the midst of a 1995 production at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C.
Macbeth has "a moral blindness, a blind spot in his character," that makes it a particularly interesting role, Keach explained. Shakespeare gave Macbeth the ability to put "extraordinary insights into the human condition" into poetry.
It was just one of many challenging roles Stacy Keach would take on, in a career that spanned more than half a century, on stage and on screen.
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