Stacy Keach, TV’s Mike Hammer and the trucker of Australia’s cult thriller Roadgames, dies at 85

Stacy Keach, an actor equally at home as Hamlet, a hard-boiled detective and a stoned narcotics officer in a Cheech and Chong film, has died. He was 85.

His wife, Malgosia Tomassi Keach, announced that he died at the couple’s home in Magdalenka, a village outside Warsaw, after “a long and difficult battle” with a serious heart condition and heart failure. “Stacy peacefully departed this world,” she said.

Who was Stacy Keach?

Born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1941, the son of actor Stacy Keach Sr, he was born with a cleft lip and partial cleft palate and trained for the stage. He played in Joseph Papp’s production of Hamlet in Central Park in 1964 and made his name off-Broadway before film came calling.

The 1970s were his peak as a screen actor. He was a washed-up boxer in John Huston’s Fat City in 1972, worked with Huston again on The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, with Robert Altman on Brewster McCloud and with Ridley Scott on The Duellists, Scott’s first feature. He co-wrote and produced the western The Long Riders, appearing alongside his brother James Keach, and turned up as the hapless Sergeant Stedenko in Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke and Nice Dreams.

Why do Australians remember him?

Because of Roadgames. In Richard Franklin’s 1981 thriller, Keach plays a long-haul truck driver crossing the Nullarbor who becomes convinced a serial killer is on the road with him, with Jamie Lee Curtis as the hitchhiker he picks up. Made for A$1.75 million, a big budget for an Australian film at the time, it flopped at the local box office. It has since been rediscovered as a cult favourite, and Franklin went on to direct Psycho II in Hollywood.

What made him a TV star?

Mike Hammer. Keach played Spillane’s two-fisted New York private eye in TV films and then a series from 1984 to 1987, returning to the role in later TV films. A new generation knew him as Henry Pope, the warden of Fox River in Prison Break, and as Cardinal Kevin Kearns in Blue Bloods. He also had a recurring role in The Blacklist and voiced characters on The Simpsons six times.

His film work never stopped: John Carpenter’s Escape from L.A., American History X, Oliver Stone’s W., The Bourne Legacy, Alexander Payne’s Nebraska and Sin City: A Dame to Kill For. He narrated The Pixar Story, and his final film was Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly for Netflix.

He is survived by his wife and his brother James.